If you love trees and tree farms, then you should love what the Texas agriculture exemption has done for them. In honor of Earth Day, here’s an out-take from my recent post on farms and suburbs for the national land-use website The New Geography, an interesting aside relayed to me by Phillip Williams, developer of Montgomery Farm in Allen:
Margaret Crow thought that cows stank. Margaret was the elegant wife of Trammell Crow, Jr., a Dallas property developer who created the Dallas Design District, Dallas Market Center, Atlanta’s Peachtree Center and San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center.
The problem was that without any cows, Mr. Crow would not be able to obtain an agricultural exemption on his extensive properties and would instead pay full Texas property taxes. How the hell, he asked, can you get an ag exemption without any cows? He posed the question to a young CPA at Arthur Young, Crow’s accounting firm, who shot back a memo to Crow saying sir, you can have your agricultural exemption: plant a tree farm.
That CPA was young Philip Williams.
”By 1988,” says Williams, “Every major real estate developer in Texas had a tree farm.”
We have people of superior intelligence commenting here on Dallas Dirt. Proof: someone just posted a comment that I think is brilliant and appropriate for Earth Day. Why don’t electricians wire houses so that, as you walk out the door, you could flip a switch and turn off all electrical outlets? Not only would that save electricity it would prevent potential fires from hair dryers/curling irons/irons/Christmas tree lights left plugged in. Our house is wired as a “smart house”, meaning we are able to access electronics (lights, music) from our cell phones or computer. Naturally, I have done it once in nine years. But if I could shut down the juice remotely, I might do it more often.
Are growing. When real estate agents host economists and other experts to give us the city’s financial pulse, I get dirty looks whenever I ask about commercial real estate because it’s not considered positive news right now. On Monday, W. Michael Cox did say this: residential real estate has a sort of safety net — homes are politically touchy-feely, and politicians don’t want to see folks kicked out of their homesteads. But don’t expect the federal government to start rescuing shopping centers or office buildings.
Update: Time posted a story on the looming commercial real estate crisis yesterday.