Land Use Problems in Michigan

Abstract

Michigan, like the other Lake States, has its land problems, and these problems in the respective states are in many ways quite similar. The non-agricultural land in Michigan constitutes about 20,000,000 acres or nearly 60 per cent of the area of the entire state, and the bulk of this type of land lies in the northern counties. In this northern portion of the state only about one-fifth of the land is in farms, and this farm acreage has varied only slightly during the last twenty-five years, so that it may be reasonably expected that over 15,000,000 of acres in these northern districts will remain indefinitely or permanently wild. Of the original forest land of 35,500,000 acres, only about 2,000,000 acres remain in merchantable virgin forest with the resultant countless numbers of abandoned and stranded towns and communities. With a tax reversion law in operation since 1893, several millions of acres of cut-over land have passed to the state, and extensive tracts of such non-agricultural acreage are being retained in public ownership and are being managed by the State Conservation Department and federal agencies, not only for timber production but also for hunting, fishing and other recreational use. Several million acres more are due to revert to the state shortly, merely because the private owners see no chance of realizing a revenue equal to or exceeding the carrying charges. The suspension of mining activity in the western counties of the Upper Peninsula has caused even greater distress. The employees in the copper mines have dropped from 16,000 to less than 2,000, and the annual production of iron ore from a peak of 18,000,000 tons to 2,500,000 tons. As a result, the tax base for that section of the state has decreased to the point where it is impossible to raise sufficient funds for education, public health, relief, roads and other necessary social facilities ordinarily provided by local government. Subsidies of many sorts from state funds are required in order that townships and school districts may continue to exist, which raises many questions regarding public finances, rural land zoning, consolidation of uneconomic school districts and townships, and proper use of these vast land areas, a large portion of which are not now productive in any manner. It would appear with advances in the technologies, and voluntary limitations of population, the total of the lands worked intensively for the production of crops may shrink indefinitely, that intensive urban industrialization may concentrate indefinitely be-