The building trade celebrated filling wetlands as cheap premium building sites.

Evidence

“Many good building sites are going unnoticed because developers and builders see them only as swamps, tidal marshes or low land along lakes or rivers,” House and Home wrote in 1958. “Some of these are in areas close to town that have been passed over while higher land all around has skyrocketed in price. Yet the marshy land can sometimes be bought and filled in for much less than the cost of the surrounding land.” In the next six pages, the magazine illustrated the opportunities open to smart builders. In Florida, a new Venice was under construction in a mangrove swamp; on Long Island, 106 fine houses were rising on 44 newly filled acres; in Connecticut, a builder had shown how to transform a small tract of water into profitable building lots; in Ohio, a beautiful subdivision was replacing marshland along Lake Erie; and in New Jersey, a marsh was becoming a summer home resort. As the editors argued in a second article, “millions of premium homesites can be reclaimed from under water with today’s new and more durable dredges – more land than even the Dutch have empoldered with all their dikes.” — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 641

Categorization

• XREF: Builders destroying the natural features their subdivisions were named for (earlier ch) now extends to filling wetlands for premium homesites — the economic incentive perverse against environment. — connects to: Builders filled wetlands partly because dredged bay-bottom made cheap fill — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 661

Broader Connections

• Builders filled wetlands partly because dredged bay-bottom made cheap fill #expands (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 661