Looking at the big picture, Independence Development in its current state is an anomaly compared to everything around it.
Those allied to prevent its development claim that houses on it would not fit the style of the county. Really, where? Not around Independence Development – there are no large ranch operations anywhere near it.
The property seems to represent a myth of country life that people who live near it hoped to find by moving to Elbert County. They can see this myth out their windows and from the roads as they drive around it without, apparently, realizing it’s a symbol of a lifestyle from a bygone time that no longer exists around there.
Stopping the progress of the Independence Development won’t bring that lifestyle back.
The pseudo-science of planning and zoning affords innumerable mechanisms to exploit by third parties wishing to reach out from their own property domains to invent claims for properties they have no natural right to control. Water, roads, schools, style, the list of intervention justifications is virtually endless and completely malleable. The statutes exist and they will be used.
It’s a dirty business and the phenomenon of large numbers of people so engaged does not cleanse the activity of its unjust nature. Might is, in fact, not right. Or at least it didn’t used to be.
The bottom line is the folks allied against this development seek to protect their own property values by keeping livable real estate in their vicinity more scarce. They use planning and zoning – collective coercive tactics – to impose an artificial market condition to prevent a natural equilibrium in a sustainable property market from arising.
But scarcity never solved anything. If America stands for anything, its legal foundation was intended to give citizens the tools to overcome economic scarcity – not induce it! The statutes that exist to artificially impose market scarcity to unjustly enrich some citizens at the expense of others are completely repugnant to our whole way of life.
On those grounds, I hope they don’t succeed.