Where can you find greenfield or brownfield land to build a new neighborhood? My county is already converting the last two large parcels into residential.
It's city, not agricultural terrain. There's a good chance sometime in the next 20 years the city authorities will force you to invest in it. Maybe even immediately.
Lincoln Park Golf Course. Obviously it’s accessible to a lot of neighborhoods not just the wealthy one I mentioned. But when I see golf courses I think of all the affordable housing that could be built on that land.
There's a lot of buildable land. It's just not highly desirable. The land is good, and green, and the neighbors are agreeable, but it's not close to a major city.
EDIT: Case in point, my first purchase in 2017 was 5 acres of buildable land 30 minutes from a tertiary city, with an existing 900 SF manufactured home and 400 SF garage. Total price: $30,000
Part of the reason it's so expensive here, though, is the swath of city and county owned open space around the outskirts of town. Maybe some day it'll get developed, but I think it'll be a long time before that can happen.
While highest and best use is indeed rare, much of what appears to be vacant is so for important reasons such as utility rights of way, contaminated sites, watershed protection, or geologically unstable land. What is needed are dense clusters of development like we used to build before cars and the green city movement.
> just west of woodside there's hundreds of square miles of completely undeveloped land
The terrain in that area would make it quite difficult to build dense housing there - it's even steeper than the very hilly area that Woodside itself is built on. It's not that it can't be done, but it is far more expensive (think about the cost of adding infrastructure like water, sewer, etc), compared to building housing in an already developed area, like infill development on land previously zoned only for commercial purposes.
True. It is gigantic. I heard rumors that an outdoor mall operator wanted to develop the space. But it’s anyone guess. I’m sure the Wilsonville city council and others are working to not let it go undeveloped and turn into a blight.
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