Stripping the land

I wonder quite often why we do things the way we do them and how we got to it.

One of those wonderings was about subdivisions and creating sections for residential houses. Two places come to mind: Long Bay and Riverhead.

I followed the story around Long Bay development and subdivision rather loosely, drove past it several times over the last weeks while taking the family to the beach.
Massive developments, massive roadworks, culverts, banks with little sections and driveways. It looks almost surreal and industrial. It once was a farm with paddocks and trees, now there not a single tree left, just bare stripped land, terrassed for easy building of houses like ducks in a row. However I believe noone got their ducks in a row there really. The whole place looks just boring and dead. The earthworks took two years. The noise, dust and cost must have been incredible to produce this outcome.

Riverhead South is a new subdivision, welll south of Riverhead, the village I live in. The same thing is going on. Once farmland and orchards, now completely stripped of everything, no soil, no grass no trees. The smell of stinky clay is disturbing. They did not leave a single tree. It was reasonably flat before, I have no idea why everything had to be stripped. The earthworks have been going on for half a year and are far from finished. The noise and dust that is covering the neighbours… incredible.

Why are we doing this? Why are we sinking so much money and time into reshaping the land? Why can’t we just do subdivisions the good old way? Remove some trees, put pegs in, highlight your building platform and leave it to the buyer to decide what to do instead of spending all this money to strip, get “reimbursed” by the buyer and have him planting again.

Who developed this funny way of skinning the land that does not seem to make any sense to me?