Ranchette Development

In 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart struggling to define obscenity, famously stated, “I know it when I see it.” Defining and measuring the growth of ranchette development has suffered from the same lack of clarity.

A strictly adhered to definition for a ranchette has not been widely accepted in order to track statistical data. Ranchette development can loosely be defined as low-density housing occurring on former agricultural lands.

The U.S. Census Bureau defines urban density as greater than 1,000 people per square mile, which roughly equates to 1.6 people per acre. Lower densities are lumped into rural. However, the definition of ranchette density varies greatly from one housing unit per 1.7 acres up to one unit per 40 acres.

The lure of country living on a piece of land beyond the urban, metro area, yet close enough to commute there, has resulted in an increase of ranchette housing units. Ranchette residential parcels leave a greater footprint on the land by consuming large chunks of land (frequently agricultural lands) per housing unit and fragmenting ecosystems.

Housing development needs to occur to accommodate growth in a region, but the existence of ranchette parcels induces leapfrog developments. In order for the next round of development to occur, realtors and developers have to bypass the existing large-acre parcels and move further into undeveloped, rural settings further straining fire dangers and landscape fragmentation.

Ranchette Development in the Central Valley

With projected population growth in California’s Central Valley expected to more than double from 2.7 million in 1990 to 6.1 million in 2020, an accompanying housing increase is necessary. However, ranchette development converts agricultural lands without adequately supplying the needed housing units.

Without an accepted tracking mechanism for ranchettes, the American Farmland Trust undertook the task of determining the extent of rural residential sprawl in the Central Valley. At the time, California Department of Conservation's Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program, the state agency that produces maps and statistical data used for analyzing impacts on California’s agricultural resources, did not track rural development at this low level of density.

Currently FMMP tracks rural residential/rural commercial development, which includes ranchettes, farmsteads, gravel lots, small packing sheds, compost facilities, and waterski lakes on four pilot counties: Fresno, Madera, Merced, and Stanislaus.

Published in 2000, Ranchettes: The Subtle Sprawl declared that the Central Valley had numerous small rural parcels of land and that ranchette development was an inefficient manner to meet the growing housing needs.

The study identified nearly 80,000 rural land parcels covering more than 540,000 acres of land within the study area slated for single-family residence development. Estimating a population of roughly 200,000, the land area of the ranchettes encompasses nearly 20 times the amount of land used by urban residents of the Central Valley.