Profiting from developing floodways is morally equivalent to selling tainted meat

Evidence

Because the nation’s courts had severely restricted regulation of private land use, the report devoted a chapter to the necessity of establishing new legal precedents. The report also called for a campaign to overcome the common view among property owners that restrictions on their right to develop land amounted to robbery. “Land whose development would be hazardous may be the place to begin,” the report argued. “Surely it should be possible to develop a national consensus that profits from the residential development of a floodway are the moral equivalent of profits from selling tainted meat. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 538

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘profit from developing a floodway = profit from tainted meat’ is a vivid rhetorical frame for a piece on how postwar sprawl normalized hazard-zone development.
• XREF: Directly useful to the reader’s LGST course as concrete evidence of how environmentalists pushed to redefine acceptable property conduct in the early 1970s. — connects to: Failing to monetize human life skews flood projects toward property and development promotion — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 234