Comment by potato3732842

Many states have adopted various sorts of watershed protection or conservation laws that make many areas undevelopable in any profitable way. The cost of the hoops one must jump through to prove some small project will not run afoul of these laws is a non starter....unless the developer is professional capital fueled operation looking to put in a chain store, strip mall or 5-over-N. That drags up adjacent values enough that the suburban subdivision developers show up and start buying the farms, etc, etc.

So in a perverse sort of way you basically get what you want, wide swaths of low/no development wilderness, but it's paid for by the everyman not the billionares.