Brian McConnell is the steward of a 100-acre farm, just south of Pittsburgh,
that has been in his family since 1752. It lies in a bucolic county once quilted
with picturesque dairy farms, but which is now threatened by the encroachments
of suburban developments. Two housing projects abut McConnell’s property;
another is in the planning stage. If he sold his family’s land to a developer,
McConnell would enjoy a windfall (adjacent parcels have garnered as much as
$60,000 an acre). He would also lose the family farmhouse, a local landmark that
celebrates its bicentennial next year, where his five siblings and their
families still reunite for holidays.“I’m the seventh generation that has
owned this farm,” he says, “and I don’t want to be the one who screws it up.” McConnell is by no means alone. Many of us with large real-estate legacies
face similar pressures and opportunities. The solution from a purely financial
perspective is almost always to sell to the highest bidder—usually a
developer—and not look back. But our land legacies are more than financial
assets; they are often intimately tied to our family heritage, memories, shared
values and sense of place and home. Many of us struggle with these often
intangible, but nonetheless crucial, considerations when weighing our options
about the disposition of this most emotionally evocative of assets.
The
relentless rise in value of property and the concurrent increase in property
taxes throughout the country have heightened the urgency of this problem. “If
you’re talking about the third generation or so of owners, they might easily be
land rich, but cash poor,” says David Katz, a land-use consultant in the Napa
and Sonoma areas of California. “The financial burden in taking care of the
property can be substantial, and there is a lot of pressure to sell, because
they know how much the land around them is going for. So their question is: How
can we generate income on the property other than by selling it?”
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