Survey Results by Location

"They're continuing to build at a pretty good pace. I see farms in the Richland area, big farms, five or six hundred acres that are selling all the road frontage to developers and they're building home I would guess somewhere between a hundred fifty and two hundred thousand [dollars in price]. It's changing the flavor of the community a lot." --Small town resident

"Might as well subdivide it if you're gonna lose it." --Farmer

"Farmland. There's a few houses, you have your neighbors, but your neighbors aren't on top of you. That's what everybody's movin' out here for. But at the same time, as more people move out here that's what we're losing - farmland. It's kind of a vicious circle. And there is no plan. There's no planning involved in how it goes about. It just happens." -- Small town resident

"'Cause each farmer is now selling off all his land, up goes the big housing development. There's several of 'em there that weren't there eight or nine years ago. And, so it's moving this way." --Small town resident

Citizens Speak

"I just don't want to see that good tillable prairie dirt turned into housing. It's a way of life. It's an attitude." --Small town resident

"If we're a livestock farmer, one of the things we have to be able to do is protect our borders from encroachment because we do some things that aren't real pleasant to some other people. And we need that large enough block of land. It doesn't have to say it's thousands and thousands of acres, but you have to be enough that when we spread manure that we're not choking everybody out." --Farmer

"We're a very small population, we can afford to give up a lot of green space. A lot of green space. If you live in Kalamazoo, I wouldn't be too worried about the abolition of green space. I think we've got a number of years before that becomes a real harsh concern." --Developer

"If a farmer can't farm his land anymore, what's he going to do with it? It's hard for him to find somebody to come up with the money to buy it for farming, so they turn it into other uses. If you're gonna retire, if you've been farming and you've got to retire, all you've got, really, are your assets - your land." --Historic preservationist

"You get taxed out of keeping the land." --Farmer

"I think our area is very diverse. And, and I'd like to see it continue that way. We have rural areas, we have good crop land, and I think that's one thing we need to protect." --Township official

"Well, I've come full circle from wanting to see every piece of vacant land with a building and black top, to going the open space, land set aside for parks. Having come up from a farm, I'm very sensitive to the issue that is rampant nationwide, that we're eating up our farm land in a very rapid manner." --Realtor