MLT Newsletter
April, 1997
It's spring time. The economy still appears to be intact. There's a lot
of land up for sale in southwest lower Michigan and development
continues to creep westward from Kalamazoo.
My brother has a construction business. Sometimes he builds new houses,
but most of the time he remodels old houses. Remodeling invariably
requires tearing up somebody's home. (It also involves a great deal of
marriage counseling and he's good at that, too. He and his crew are so
endearing that his old customers often call with nit-noid little
projects just to keep them around. He could have a real racket going if
he was willing to latch on to one or two of his wealthy customers as
carpenter for life.) Anyway, much of his time is spent tearing out old
framing, old woodwork, and old siding. All that stuff has to go some
place, and I've got a barnful. A lot of it predates plywood: hardwood 2
x 4's that are actually two inches by four inches; long, wide planking
used for roofing and underlayment (with the square nails still in
them); and some hefty support timbers. Just the other day he brought me
another load. After we emptied his trailer, I surveyed the pile in the
middle of my barn and remarked, "There must be several hundred dollars
worth of wood stacked up here." My brother quickly replied, "Yeah, but
it would cost me sixty bucks to dump it in a landfill." He hates
throwing things away. (Last year, as a volunteer at a Habitat/or
Humanity site, he spent much of his time fishing plywood and framing
out of a dumpster because the crew had found it easier to grab a new
sheet or uncut stud rather than take a moment or two to pull some nails
or otherwise reclaim used materials.)
My neighbor came by this weekend. He's trying to round up some folks to
show up at the next township board meeting. There's 140 acres just to
our north that some guy out of Grand Rapids wants to sell off in
two-acre parcels. It used to be that township zoning required
agricultural plots to be broken up into nothing smaller than ten acres,
and then, after several years, they could be divided again. Things
change. The dairy farmer across the street says that the property is
prime farm land and that a local farmer made an offer but that the guy
in Grand Rapids wants $6,000 an acre. He's willing to sell them off for
only $500 down and I can just see the caravan of grim manufactured
homes forming just across the Michigan-Indiana border. My neighbor says
that the township supervisor is all for it. Says he's a builder and
believes that farmland going residential is "progress."
If it goes through, our township supervisor/builder most likely won't
get any work out of it. The other day I counted all the new homes that
went in between my house and the main road two miles west. Only one was
built on-site. The rest were glued and stapled somewhere else and then
trucked in. The loss of farmland notwithstanding, it's an aesthetic
nightmare. The rolling hills, once fields of corn, soybean and hay, are
becoming dotted with blue and cream-colored, cookie-cutter modulars
with satellite dishes.
I don't know what's going to come from the township meeting on
Wednesday night. In the meantime, I'm planting trees on the knoll just
to our north. I'm planting a lot of them. The next MLT meeting is this
Sunday, April 13, 1997 at the farm of Bobbi Martindale and Jon Towne
(24760 County Road 681, Bangor. Agenda items include consideration for
further MOFFA funding, plans for a 25 year school of homesteading
reunion, and a 20 year newsletter retrospective. Potluck and meeting
start at 5 PM. As always, all are welcome.
-Mike Phillips
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