November 9, 2003 Santa Cruz (California) Sentinel

HEATHER BOERNER:
GIMME SHELTER
Farmland, housing rift resurfaces

As much as Santa Cruz County likes to think of itself as a world apart, it turns out that we are not alone.

In this case, I’m talking about the tension between the multibillion-dollar farm industry and the multibillion-dollar housing industry.

We’ve got the problem here: as housing demand grows, houses are sprouting up where veggies once did, and closer and closer to working farms.

In February, cut flower farmer James Nagamine of Watsonville put it this way:

"(Housing moving in next to farms) is like someone moving into a house next door to you and telling you when you can vacuum or when you can take a shower. And what recourse do you have? Little if any. This isn’t government regulation. It’s an individual person moving in next door to you and dictating what you can do."

Nagamine’s farm hadn’t been vandalized in 41years, until last year, when construction on the nearby housing development Vista Montana began. Then, the spray painting started. For Nagamine, when someone messes with his greenhouses, they are sabotaging his livelihood.

But what do you do about it, short of resisting any new housing? Since that’s not an option in a county that’s so expensive, the county Board of Supervisors is considering a new law that would require real estate agents to have new residents sign forms saying they understand they are moving into the equivalent of beautiful industrial
neighborhoods.

But already it’s being scaled back, due to complaints from the real estate community. The board postponed its decision on the issue until its Dec. 9 meeting so South County Supervisor Tony Campos, who is also a Realtor, could iron
out concerns from farmers and real estate agents.

The changes to the ordinance, as proposed in the staff report from last week’s meeting, take the teeth out. Now, real estate agents basically have to do what they already have to do: Record that residents got a notice that land near their house is farmed and could mean noise, smells and early hours, but only if those residents live within 200 feet of a farm. The other two things it does is expand notice to tenants as well as landowners, and add a sentence to everyone’s property tax bills that reminds people, if they didn’t know, that the county is a rural county.

Now, that may not seem obvious. For those who live in Santa Cruz, the San Lorenzo Valley or Scotts Valley, farming isn’t something that hits you everyday. But if you live anywhere else, and especially if the view from your house is rolling hills of strawberries, you know you aren’t living in the middle of the greenbelt. You’re living next door to a business.

As Bill Ringe, a former apple orchard owner said earlier this year, "You wouldn’t build a subdivision next to an industrial park because of the noise. The problem is, people think of agriculture as open space. But it’s not. It’s a business."

Now, I’m not usually so hard on homeowners. We all know it’s hard enough to find a place you can afford in this county, consistently ranked one of the least affordable in the country. But at the same time, you need to be smart about what you’re buying. You don’t want to be the person who moves next to a wastewater treatment plant and then complains about the stench.

Watsonville has figured out one way to deal with this: Its urban growth boundary sets aside the most fertile ag land, protecting it from development, while directing growth toward other, less fertile areas.

Our neighbors to the south have another idea how to deal with it. The Monterey County Agricultural and Historical Land Conservancy runs one of the 46 programs studied by the American Farmland Trust and the University of
California’s Agricultural Issues Center and the Farm Foundation.

The study found that agricultural easements are one of the main ways farmers protect their land from the encroachment of houses. In Monterey County, for instance, the land conservancy has set aside 7,748 acres on 20 properties, "strategically located on the western edges of several Salinas Valley cities, forcing the redirection of their expansion away from the best agricultural soils.... to less productive hillsides to the east."

Contact Heather Boerner at
hboerner@santacruzsentinel.com

You can find this story online at:
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2003/
November/09/local/stories/19local.htm