"First, no investor is entitled to have legislation, and the American taxpayer, protect his investment. Yet this is what landowners often do. Owning land with the expectation that it can be developed constitutes making an investment. And when landowners demand that government change rural zoning to accommodate their desire to make a profit, they are asking the people to guarantee that their investment in land was a profitable one."
So how do you feel about a community scrambling to enact zoning that will effect property that it is believed might be developed? Is that not a partial taking? Is that not a local government accomodating the desire of the community so that their property values remain intact? Isn't that why zoning exists, at least in part? Good ole profit motives, huh? You know, government protecting the investment of some, but destroying that of others they deem to have less than honorable motives (obscene profits).
Government is not, in this case, destroying the investment of the developers. The developers are perfectly free to sell the property they bought. They can either build houses on it at the existing zoning or sell it as they bought it, as farmland. They aren't entitled to make unbelievable amounts of money on their real estate purchase any more than I am guaranteed by law to make money on my more modest one. No one is even saying they can't build on the land they bought. They just can't build endless thousands of houses whose occupants will swamp local infrastructure.
Did you read the bit in the article about how the new immigrants to the county will require 125 new schools? At millions of dollars per school? The developers sure-God aren't going to pay for that. The taxpayers have to shell out for it. Do the developers have the right to demand the rest of us do that? I dispute that. Taxes are already bad enough, thanks. There's no reason the taxpayers of Virginia should fork over money to further enrich a development corporation.
You're not from around here, are you? Come visit us sometime. Spend a few hours parked in motionless traffic on Route 7 or I-66 every morning and afternoon for a week. You may come to feel differently.
Good night.