Under All Is The Land
By Jim Palmer Jr.

Most reasonable people in this country aspire to own land and home, and/or value the freedom to do so. We are so blessed to have such a choice when many in the world do not! Realtors® believe in the freedom to own land and we promote its wise use and widely allocated ownership. We believe that the survival and growth of free institutions and our civilization depends on it! While we believe in the creation of adequate housing, functioning cities and productive industries and farms, we also believe in the preservation of a healthful environment.

The past few years of economic boom has highlighted the local issue of lack-of-inventory and the nationwide crisis of affordability in housing. As a solution, some people concentrate on hand-outs or building tiny houses for those who seem unable to bridge the affordability gap, while others promote easier development regulations to make it more affordable and less cumbersome to develop inventory faster. What both of these ideas have in common is the need for more housing! When the supply is down and the demand is high, prices soar! When this situation occurs it becomes much more difficult to own a chunk of America.

Nonetheless, the wise among the rising generation are the ones who have come to understand the value of home ownership as a means to grow wealth. Home ownership is still proven to be the single best method to develop equity and wealth. Whole generations in this country have risen from the depths of poverty simply because of home ownership.

I’m very optimistic for the future ability of our posterity to enjoy home and land ownership! It won’t be easy, but nothing good is ever easy! Remember back in our history when the U.S. Government gave away large chunks of ground? That may seem unfair when you look at it through the prism of today’s market, but it really wasn’t a give-away in the purist sense of that idea. It was a trade off, since the new land owners had to carve it out of the wilderness and bore the cost of developing the infrastructure, allowing our nation to expand rapidly.

We’ve recently passed through an era of intense learning on the topic of growth management and while there are extreme differences in opinion about where we go from here and how we adjust to new challenges, the future still seems bright for the rising generation!