Land use and land conservation are the most important issues facing horse owners of the 21st century.
It's a message that, at least until now, has not gotten through to <?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = ST1 /?> America's horse-owning public, even to the majority of the people who participate in the land-dependent sports of foxhunting, eventing, endurance and trail riding and combined driving. And it's certainly not gotten through to the hundreds of thousands of people who keep their horses on small farms and occasionally enjoy trail rides.
Admittedly, saving trails, cross-country courses or hunting country is a tough sell because there is still a lot of land left in the United States. But precious little of that land is where most horse owners must reside to earn a living.
If you've ridden or owned horses for more than a decade, I'm sure you can think of places you used to ride that have been transformed into houses or malls, barns that have closed as suburbia surrounded them, competitions that were forced to move because their show grounds were sold to be bulldozed, or foxhunts that kept moving their territory farther and farther away from where they used to be.
And it's not going to get any better. In fact, if a 2005 study by the Brookings Institute and Virginia Tech University are correct, it's going to get much worse. (And I hasten to point out this isn't a study by a conservation group hoping to increase membership by scaring you. This is a study for business executives, predicting how they can cash in on what the authors predict will be a real-estate boom "that, by 2030, will dwarf America's post-WWI build-out.")
In three centuries, Americans have built a bit more than 300 million square feet of homes, offices, factories and other structures. But in just the next 25 years, the Brookings/Virginia Tech study projects American builders will erect 200 million more square feet of buildings-for a population they project to increase by 70 million, a figure roughly the same as that projected by the non-profit conservation group Population Connection. (Although it took 52 years for the U.S. population to double from 100 million to 200 million, it only took 39 years, from 1967 to 2006, to add another 100 million.)
These researchers estimate that the massive build-out will constitute a $25-trillion development market by 2030, "more than twice the size of the U.S. economy today." And while that's good news to many Americans, it's bad news for us horse owners. The research team christened 10 areas "megapolitans," a term that describes how cities in these regions will largely merge together into a single indistinguishable zone, rather like the endless cities and suburbs from Boston to Washington look now.
They predict that No. 1 in total population growth will be the "Southland," from Southern California to Las Vegas, which they project to grow by 8 million people. South Florida is second, with 7.5 million new homes, and the I-85 Corridor (Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh/Durham) is third with 7 million. No. 1 in new housing units will be the Atlantic Seaboard-a whopping 3.4 million new houses, an increase of 17 percent.
