The NY Times is a "city slicker" newspaper as it focuses on Mayor Bloomberg's paternalism over big gulp sugar drinks and debates whether San Francisco is becoming uncool as it attracts too man Twitter type firms. But, today it turns its attention rural Ohio and discusses the windfall that land owners there are collecting as energy companies seek to access the land. The article hints that the rural folk may not understand the fine print of the contract they signed and that there will be nasty environmental externalities (such as polluted water) caused by the new drilling.
A free market guy might counter that these energy companies have an incentive for developing a reputation as a good safe neighbor because if their operations create a mess then they will have more trouble buying land at the next rural town they seek to enter.
The other interesting point here is "ideology". Are the people of rural Ohio Republicans? It has been suggested to me that libertarian/Republicans are more comfortable with the idea that land should be used to extract resources than liberal/environmentalists who seek to "conserve" land. This ideological difference in vision concerning the stewardship of land (if true), could create an interesting spatial map that liberal/environmentalists will live in protected areas featuring high home prices while republican areas will be mined and extracted areas and that this separating equilibrium will reflect both a residential sorting effect and a "treatment effect" (due to differences in zoning and public policies).
