Photos: California Digital Library
These are aerial images of Anaheim, CA taken from 1959-1966. They show the onslaught of sprawl in the form of freeways, huge asphalt parking lots and decentralized shopping malls. By 1966, there was only a tiny strip of orange groves remaining in this area of Orange County. Are there any orange groves left today?
What is seen in this images is so famliar to us. Yet to ponder what we live in is quite disturbing. Does anyone look at this and rejoice? Maybe statisticians and economists who throw out words like, “This Christmas, sales were up 2% at Wal-Mart”. The rest of us live in the real world of sitting in traffic on the freeway, fighting and honking in the parking lot and spending odious amounts of time “shopping” for what we don’t need. In the land that nature blessed with eternal sunshine, we rarely spend time within nature.
What if there were tax breaks given to municipalities who CREATED AGRICULTURAL AREAS? We have ratables for retail stores and write-offs for SUV’s, so why not make the creation of orange groves a tax deductible expense? We could rip up those thousands of acres of parking lots in defunct and declining malls and rebuild some of the citrus lands we have lost in the last 50 years.
Does anyone imagine this possibility? Is man in control of his environment or do we passively accept that time must degrade our surroundings? Why can’t we step outside the box and think?
Here in Van Nuys 
Andrew wrote:
What if there were tax breaks given to municipalities who CREATED AGRICULTURAL AREAS? We have ratables for retail stores and write-offs for SUV’s, so why not make the creation of orange groves a tax deductible expense? We could rip up those thousands of acres of parking lots in defunct and declining malls and rebuild some of the citrus lands we have lost in the last 50 years.
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The tax breaks for agricultural areas is one of the biggest fleecings of the tax codes in the country. Wealthy individuals will buy an agricultural property (commonly a ranch) and claim it as a farm and get favorable tax for the land.
The other problem is the Value Theory of Land. I’ve mentioned this in other posts, but the price of land needs to be lower depending on the point of the supply chain. Agriculture is at the beginning, and therefore needs the lowest possible prices. In Southern California, land is so expensive that the best yield is for housing, at the other extreme of the chain. The orange groves are priced out of the market.
People can already grow their own fruits and vegetables, and should if they have the means.
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I like your views on the shrinking natural environment that used to be Orange County. I grew up there, and every time I go back, they build more houses. As far as I know, the only Orange Groves till around (at least in Southern Orange County) are those along the toll road just to the East of Irvine… and even those are dwindling. I guess you have to decide if watching, what used to be, beautiful rolling farmland be destroyed is something you want to witness. That’s why I moved! Sad truth…
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If you’d like to see more farmland, or simply more open space – then you’ve got to make it economically viable to do so. Find a way to make people rich by creating more open space, and you won’t have to worry about subsidies.
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