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I'm on the front lines of these environmental debates every day. I'm also on the front lines of the housing affordability crises (in my country not the US). On one side I have environmental agencies pushing me farther and farther away from the natural features because they beleive they need to be overprotected which reduces the amount of land left for building houses, and on the other side I've got every other level of government telling me we need to find a way to make housing more affordable. I sit in the middle and just spew facts. If the environmental agencies stick to reasonable setbacks, we can lower the price of a home. It's simple math. 500 homes @ $600K/each is the same revenue as 600 homes at $500K each. The only difference is we've been able to provide homes for 100 more families if we're able to spread our fixed costs over more units. The environment is fully protected with reasonable setbacks backed by science. By the way, I realize the math there is an oversimplification but you get the point.

There are natural features that need to be preserved and protected. No question. No one is looking to pave paradise or kill Bambi. What is questionable though is the extent to which some environmental agencies go to OVER protect natural features way beyond what the science says is required. Ephemeral streams are the textbook example of overprotection. I've got sites where farmers are growing crops in ephemeral streams. It sits dry 11 months out of the year. He fertilizes the crap out of it and harvests his crop every fall. But if we want to build a house on the land, some environmental agency wants me to keep the ephemeral stream and put a 50 foot setback on it to protect it. Why? It doesn't make any sense. As I said before, the function of the ephemeral stream is replicated on the finished lot. There is no need to isolate it like it's performs some holy function that can't be replicated. I'm not talking about continuous stream corridors or floodplains. Those have to be protected. Ephemeral streams do not. I'm sorry. They don't. They aren't fish habitat. They don't offer any sort of wildlife habitat. They don't even have any plants in them, except the crop.

I just want environmental agencies to understand the economic implications of their overprotection. Not their protection, their overprotection.