Urban sprawl
This afternoon, I went out to Washington County with the best and the bears to the Cooper Mountain Wines vinyards that sit southwest of Beaverton.
It's a beautiful vinyard, located up near the top of a hill facing out towards the coast range over some of the better wine country in Oregon. Unfortunately, it's inside the urban growth boundary (and recently, too, judging from the frantic construction going on around it), so it's in the process of being subdivided into large expensive ($320 thousand and up, according to the billboard, for what I think are 200x200) lots. I don't know how much land they have at this vinyard, but if they've got 60 acres that's US$20 million dollars.
And, of course, the construction is huge houses that cost so much money that they couldn't afford to hire an architect with any taste.
The billboard says that these big ugly houses are going to be in the vinyards, but I'll bet that the vinyard will be gone within 5 years (barring a renewed collapse of the Oregon Economy.) It's going to be just like the collapse of the Los Angeles orange industry, writ small.