Last week the legislature’s Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment Interim Committee had as one of its agenda items the issue of agricultural land conservation easements.  As reported in a story about the meeting in the Trib, the concern is,

About 2.7 million acres of Utah farmland vanished in the past six decades. That’s nearly 20% of the agricultural lands in the state, Terry Camp, public policy vice president for the Utah Farm Bureau, told lawmakers Wednesday morning.

And a possible remedy?

…there’s one solution that Camp and Utah Department of Agriculture and Food Land Conservation Program Manager Jeremy Christensen say could help: funding conservation easements.

Bottom line, the Utah Department of Agriculture is asking the legislature to consider setting aside around $10-12 million over the next decade to match federal money to help buy easements, to prevent so much ag land from being converted to development.

Back in the heyday of the Utah Quality Growth Commission, which I worked with closely during my career salad days, one of its primary tasks was to oversee and allocate money from the LeRay McAllister Open Lands Conservation Fund (named after a state senator who was key in getting the legislature to fund such a program in the face of pretty stiff resistance) (The UQGC was disbanded in 2022, and oversight of the McAllister fund, much diminished, has been taken over by the state Dept. of Agriculture). I remember on several occasions, when the Commission was considering applications for land preservation, that property owners or developers would express their concern that doing so would remove some prime land from potential development, stifling new growth and driving up costs to acquire other property.  I didn’t give such objections much credibility because there was plenty of land around to develop, and costs were (then) pretty moderate.  Not so today!

Is there a legitimate concern that removing land from potential development opportunities could exacerbate the housing affordability conundrum?

Conserving ag land and open space is a laudable goal, but much of the discussion lately at the top political levels has been the housing affordability crisis.  One of the factors identified as driving that crisis is the availability and cost of land.  To address that issue, one proposal has been made to fund state and local government to create better inventories of all government-owned lands and identify those that are underutilized and possibly make them available for development of new housing.  So could we be looking to find new land to make available for housing on the one hand, and then be taking some away through government-funded conservation easement efforts on the other?

Other states have been facing this dilemma as well, and have been paying some serious attention to it.  For example, from an editorial in the Valley News in Vermont:

Vermont is trying to thread the policy needle by promoting, on the one hand, affordable housing and, on the other, land conservation. This experiment, in the form of two bills passed by the Legislature this year, will test the proposition that these two worthy goals are compatible rather than competitive.

Gov. Phil Scott thinks they are. His remaining reservations about the conservation bill led him to let it become law without his signature, but he noted that the measure recognizes that “balancing land protection and housing is core to the state’s future.” How that balance is struck could have enormous consequences for current and future Vermonters.

Virginia is another state that has been wrestling with the housing development/conservation dilemma.  From a story two years ago,

A handful of states are considering expanding their conservation easement programs, which offer tax breaks to landowners in exchange for giving up development rights to their farms and natural lands. In many cases, those easements last in perpetuity, offering durable protection even when the property changes ownership.

But other state leaders are attacking the easement model. … opponents argue that public money should not be used to fund conservation on private land. They claim that efforts to protect natural spaces will cause housing shortages in fast-growing communities and limit tax revenues for local governments.

And in Washington State, the community of South Whidby Island has in the last year been tackling this issue head on:

More housing or protecting family farms? That is the question, Island County.

The buzzphrase need for all of Island County these past few years has been “more affordable” or “workforce” housing – it is needed for the employees of local businesses…

Owners of a heritage farm on South Whidbey made a presentation asking for support from the Langley City Council for the sale of a conservation easement on 25 acres of forest constituting part of their farm, which has been held by their family for more than 100 years.

There is a paradox here – certainly we can all identify with the desire of a family to keep its farm intact. But we also need more housing so that the employees of our small businesses have a place to live… .

This question needs to be answered now for future planning purposes – otherwise Land Trust purchases now could inhibit future neighborhood and community projects and disrupt our local economic development of Whidbey Island for years to come.

There are even studies looking at this issue:

A new study wades into the contentious debate about whether land protection negatively affects the housing supply for local communities.

Pro-development advocates have argued that land conservation removes properties from the pool of potential residential housing and therefore drives up home prices. Some studies have found empirical support for this argument.

However new research from scientists at Stanford University and the Nature Conservancy finds that conservation efforts in the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area have only had a modest effect on reducing the available housing supply.

Apparently there is an impact, maybe modest in some cases, but not zero.

What to do?  Both are important and legitimate community issues. As noted in the Vermont editorial, there needs to be a serious effort to balance the two sides.

There may be a way to accomplish this – conservation subdivisions.  Here’s a description from a paper by the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission:

Conservation subdivisions, sometimes called cluster developments, maintain a significant portion of a development site in common open space by minimizing individual lot sizes, while maintaining the overall density of development specified by a local master plan or zoning ordinance.

There are even some pretty good examples of this right here in our own backyard.  Just recently in the town of Francis:

Could building a 104-unit “conservation subdivision” in eastern Summit County actually help save open space?

Applicant Richard Rapp with Annapurna Capital Partners wants to annex about 92 acres north of Lambert Lane and Hallam Road for the project. He would combine three parcels on the north side of the annexation declaration zone to build on 25 acres near the Weber-Provo canal. The remaining 67 acres, or 70% of the total project, would remain open space.

There are plenty of other examples around our fair state.  And there’s even a study (from Colorado) that touts the benefits of such development/conservation:

We conclude that CDs (conservation developments) are poised to contribute to conservation at the landscape level in Colorado, given their proximity to protected lands.

This may be a good partnership opportunity to achieve a couple of different goals for the future of our communities.