Buy land, they stopped making it.

During a recent trip to Toronto we visited a rural gift shop, show farm, and bakery on the Niagara Escarpment near Milton. It's called Springridge Farm and offers strawberry picking, hayrides, farm visits for kids along with a gift shop and top-notch bakery. The pies, tarts and coffee are first rate.

We were visiting the place with a fellow who makes his living selling real estate. Springridge Farms sits on a south-facing slope abutting the limestone cliff walls of the Niagara Escarpment. It's a beautiful spot and I think it occupies the site of what used to be a working family farm. The gift shop, bakery, and hayrides must be what economists call value-added services. Apparently, in the First world you can't make a living growing and selling food anymore, for some reason. It's odd that it's easier to make a living doing something utterly useless like writing gaming software than it is to grow food. That must be "supply and demand" at work.

At one point, the real estate guy and I were outside looking over the property and he remarked what a great site it would be for an eight or nine unit executive estate development. This struck me as odd because I think that it already is a beautiful location and I can't think of anything that a modern suburban executive development could add that would improve the place. Now, I was looking at the scenery but I suspect that he was thinking about sales commissions. It's funny how the very features that make a site attractive to prospective builders and buyers are precisely those that get destroyed during development. After the escarpment development is built, there is no escarpment left to look at.

I enjoy real estate jargon; one of my pleasures in life is reading the advertisements on real estate billboards. For example, what executive estate means nowadays is a mock "something"-style monster home on a too-large lot. I am sure that you have seen the type of property that I mean: a place with all the trees removed to reduce construction costs, acres of green lawn that no one uses, a multiple car garage, and usually an empty pool. I know I am exaggerating but when was the last time you saw a bunch of kids playing touch football on the front lawns of one of these places or swimming in the backyard pool. Those kids are all at Whistler. Only squirrels enjoy those vast grasslands and so the question arises why people covet them. I think it comes down to showing off. Having a huge expanse of useless green grass is a way of telling the world that you have so much money you can spend it on something perfectly useless. Removing the trees makes it easier to see the land waste as you drive by. What's the point of showing off if no one can see? There's a market for this kind of place, obviously. I don't understand it myself; were money to drop down from on high into my lap, the last thing I would do is advertize to the world that I had it. But I guess showing off is a primeval thing, with genetic roots going back to dominant bucks in antelope herds and big-shouldered wolf pack alpha males.


So who would have suspected that real estate nirvana was only a few kilometres from my own house? Take a look at the sign at the entrance to the Avalon subdivision here in east Ottawa. I have masked out the developer's name so as not to single them out. It doesn't really matter who they are of course, since they are each worse than the next. Perfectly planned, they announce. Wow, paradise, valhalla, land of dreams, and only 5 km away. The mythological Avalon is an island best known for its sublime apples; Paula Reds for the gods, I suppose. I drove through this "perfectly planned" neighbourhood. Not an orchard in sight.

Here at the eastern edge of the city, cornfields turn into suburbia on a daily basis. As usual with this kind of urban development, it is resulting in serious roadway bottlenecks because road design and construction never seems to keep up with house building. You would think that after 60-70 years of this, city planners would have figured out how to better deal with this kind of expansion.


I saw this very peculiar sign the other day. If someone out there can explain Zen Urban Flats to me, please do so. I guess I could drop by their sales office and ask but as I have said before on these pages, I am a firm believer in intellectual osmosis and I don't want to stand too close to folks who invent this stuff. I am forever fearful that whatever it is they have is contagious.