People are funny about land, aren’t they? They love their home and the land it sits on, wherever it may be and however it is that they’ve chosen to live. They take great care in landscaping and making it appealing to themselves and to others. They certainly don’t want neighbors and non-neighbors putting in their two cents about how to care for it, they don’t want to be told when to sell and how much to sell for, and often they don’t care to get to know those neighbors.

Yet every time a local landowner who owns more than 1/8 of an acre that is not in a neighborhood development decides it’s time to sell their home and the land that it sits on, every one around them has an opinion. Thanks to social media they get to shout their opinion louder than ever. 

If you live on more than an eighth of an acre, you may have dealt with this phenomenon when you made the decision to sell your land and move. If you have maintained a farm on that land, you probably have had to listen to many more people tell you what to do with your property.

You have paid the outrageous property taxes year after year, as long as you’ve been there, often with nothing to show for it from the county or city you paid those taxes to. 

For those with a farm, you’ve worked the land and tried to eke out a living doing so. If you’re lucky enough to live in a county where they give a tax break for farming or foresting, that’s helped make it possible for you to do so. (Don’t think for a minute that a program like that doesn’t come with it’s own cost or that you don’t pay your fair share.)

In the county where we live, we’ve been able to do so, turning in meticulous paperwork every three years, praying for approval each time. It’s a small tax break, but it helps us hold onto the land that we love. And in our county, when we decide to sell or decide to stop farming, we owe the taxes on the past three years that we would have paid without the tax break. It’s kind of a punishment for not continuing, I guess. It’s a nightmare to think about facing that – not sure how we will manage, if we ever do retire and sell. But it’s a burden we don’t wish on our children, so we won’t saddle them with it. We will sell and move somewhere with a smaller footprint and with less of a tax burden on our sons. 

We had the chance to purchase some adjacent property a couple of times through the years, but it was always too expensive so we could not, even though we dreaded the encroachment of the nearby city. And we learned then that you simply have to let it go – you must learn that you can’t buy everything, and you can’t always dictate how your neighbors live. We did not protest a development that went up on one side of us, because we couldn’t buy the land, and the land owner wanted to sell it. It was their property, they could do what they wanted with it, within the scope of the zoning. We got used to it and they have been good neighbors.

Recently I’ve seen hundreds of social media comments about a local home with a good amount of land that was sold to developers. The commenters “loved” to look at the house as they drove by and were so sad that it would now be a housing development. They lamented that the owner would sell to a developer rather than another family. I imagine that no family would be able to purchase the property for what it was worth. Pretty simple. 

Why begrudge the owners for selling their property to whoever they want to sell it to. When you sell your home, you usually sell it to the highest bidder. Why not? You’ve paid taxes on the land all these years and have maintained it, putting many thousands of dollars into it. If you aren’t willing to buy it, then at least be gracious and not complain about what someone does with their own property. 

We can’t have everything our own way, all the time, and I am so weary of everyone not just wanting their own way, but being ugly to anyone who does not agree. I’m sure no one can imagine protesting their next-door neighbor, in a neighborhood, selling their home, but they love to protest the farmer finally selling their land. You’ve loved driving by my land all these years, and you’ve enjoyed not having a neighborhood right behind your home, but unless you want to purchase it for the price it’s selling for, then “let it go”. 

Not long ago there was a huge controversy in the town where I live, over a proposed development that would have been where a large farm has been located for as long as I can remember. The family who owns the land have been good stewards of their farm all these years and they’ve paid a fortune in taxes, even in the farm tax program. When my sons were little, they begged to drive by that farm on the way home from preschool daily just to see the barn and silo. I didn’t love going home that route, though, because a newer neighborhood was midway between the farm and our home, and it had added a ton of traffic on our little roads. But how can you refuse a little boy a glance at a silo?

Well, the people who had populated that new development years ago were now helping to lead the protest against the sale of the farmland to a developer. Irony, right?! People got very vocal and very ugly. Speaking to the farmer recently, I learned that one of the most vocal protestors was not doing so in social media but politically, with their connections (you know the kind that wealthy people always have). This is a wealthy newer local resident, who lives off a main road and who would not be affected by the traffic. This really blew my top, since this resident has a lot of their own land and could buy plenty more somewhere else if they wanted. So why did this wealthy family begrudge the farm owner selling the land they’d taken care of all these years? Farmers consider their farmland their nest egg. They don’t have a 401K from their workplace, so when they are ready to retire, they sell their land. There used to be a phrase that described farmers: “land rich, cash poor”. Often farmers scrape by for years in order to pay taxes to hold onto their land. No one should begrudge their decision to sell their home, or stand in their way. 

I’m tired of this “okay for me, but not for you” narrative that is becoming entrenched in our society. Is it because social media allows us to constantly spew our opinions about everything, with no real-life discussions or differing viewpoints necessary? 

Is it just me, or has it made everyone feel entitled – not just to their opinion, but to have everything around them exactly like they want it to be all the time, neighbors be damned.