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A Mormon Tycoon Wants to Build Joseph Smith's Mega-Utopia in Vermont
A Mormon Tycoon Wants to Build Joseph Smith's Mega-Utopia in Vermont
David Hall is snapping up farmland to bring his vision of a sustainable high-density community to life. The neighbors are horrified. From Nicole Antal, a 30-year-old librarian in Sharon, Vermont, was putting together a town report in late January when she stumbled upon a series of odd land purchases: In just three months, a Utah-based foundation had quietly bought more than 900 acres of nearby farmland, an area larger than Central Park.
bloomberg.com




This is local to me, and it's really rather bizarre.
I'm confused what 20,000 people are going to move for this
yaknow, i never thought about that part!
and I don't know anything about zoning, but I'm not sure how easy it's going to be getting property rezoned from farmland to the several kinds of zoning he presumably needs
not to mention the lines of water, sewer, electric, gas, etc for 20,0000 people in a rural plot of land with little to no existing infrastructure for it
Well, the thing about tumbridge/sharon/etc is that they likely don't have much for zoning laws right now, if anything.
A lot of the land he bought actually has houses already there but he convinced people to sell their homes. Maybe that's how you end up with the fairly high $3600/acre price that he's paying.
A lot of these are probably normal ruralish/farmish places. But don't think like, big midwestern farms. They're probably like 25-50 acre purchases, sometimes much smaller, lots that seem to just be a couple acres.
Vermont has a tax situation called current use
Now, current use is a pretty cool thing for folks with rural land. The random site I googled says:
Which is basically my understanding of the law. So that would apply to the parts that are farmland. However, if you bought the land for $250/acre in 1990 and someone is offering you $3600 an acre, that's a pretty strong price, and what you might save by having it in Current Use might not make up for that. Especially if you're a retired person who can't deal with 6 month long winters anymore and would love to head to florida. And rural vermont is certainly an aging population.
So yeah you sell the land to this rich guy, and he figures theres no zoning out here in the boonies. (btw, once he buys all this land, he can camp it in Current Use and pay basically no taxes on it. If he gets rid of the houses that are currently there, he can probably put that land in Current Use as well)
But I'm a bit confused because this isn't just a bunch of super rural middle-of-the-woods farms, a lot of the property he's buying up is basically in town, like semi residential areas, not vast tracks of woodlands and farms. People live here! Communities exist!
But I guess they're relatively poor communities, and while I haven't specifically researched their zoning laws, I suspect they don't have much. But the thing is that the planning board can decide to make them up any time they want. And saying you can't mix residential and commercial areas, can't have multi families on the same plot of land... most of these things are fairly standard.
Shit, there's been much smaller (like, 10-20 family) projects that are co-housing developments that have been trying to get zoning approval in nearby towns for like a decade and not been able to do it.
I guess he's thinking of this as a fairly long term plan- like, not breaking ground for maybe 50 years. And maybe he assumes that cities by then will be such cesspools that everyone will want to move to his utopias? I suppose that isn't an entirely impossible assumption on his part.
idk I'm rambling, tired, and confused by this whole mess. I just know it makes for interesting conversation around the local towns here.