Why Focus on the Blackland Prairie?
But this isn't a eulogy it's a calculation.
This isn’t for the visualizers, the ones who see the world in color and geometry. This is for the non-visualizers: the ones who think in equations, balance sheets, and ROI. The ones who prefer money over trees.
Once stretching across 12 million acres, today less than 1% of the Blackland Prairie remains, fragmented into small, scattered patches. In San Antonio, it once covered an estimated 175,000 acres around 56% of the city's total land area (ESRI GIS, rough estimate). But how much remains today is unknown no comprehensive survey has been conducted.
This prairie sits directly in the path of urban expansion, yet no policy or pricing model reflects its ecological worth. That’s what makes it the perfect test case, to rethink how we value land especially rare, irreplaceable ecosystems hiding in plain sight.
Why it matters:
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Taxpayers can’t see how land is valued or what revenue is being missed.
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It hides the real cost of development.
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It enables underpricing of ecologically vital land.
Because of these gaps, I used secondary sources, environmental research, and economic models to estimate the true(er) value of the Blackland Prairie.
Using a logistic decay model, the forecasted remaining Blackland Prairie within San Antonio will be at functional loss in ~75 years. If development rates accelerate this timeline shrinks dramatically, potentially within a few decades.
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- Sā (Sustainable Net Worth): $5,000 per acre per year (carbon sequestration, flood control, soil health)
- HR (Health ROI): $2,000 per acre per year (mental, physical, and psychological health benefits)
- EV (Extinction Volatility): 5% annual risk of ecosystem collapse
- I (Intrinsic Factor): 1.5 multiplier (cultural, historical, and ecological significance)
- S (Scarcity Factor): 1.2 (to reflect the extreme rarity)
E3VF= (5000 + 2000) X 1.5 X e^1.2
0.05
Final Estimate of Blackland Prairie in San Antonio:
Total Estimated Remaining Prairie: 14,399 acres
Protected Prairie (Conservation Easements): ~2,880 acres
Unprotected Prairie with High-Quality Soil: ~6,912 acres
Total Prairie Loss from Historical Extent: ~91%
Percentage of All Remaining Blackland Prairie in Texas Located in San Antonio: ~12%
Percentage of the Original Blackland Prairie That Still Exists in San Antonio: ~8.23%
- Current market price for suburban development: $132,300 per acre ($3.04 per sq ft)
- Current market price for multi-use development: $198,450 per acre ($4.55 per sq ft)
- Bayesian-adjusted price considering rarity and soil value: $219,036 per acre ($5.03 per sq ft) Bayesian adjustments reflect updated probabilities based on ecological scarcity and changing development patterns factoring in new data, not just old assumptions.
- Revised True Economic Value $766,947 per acre ($17.62 per sq ft)
- Blackland Prairie land is being sold at a fraction of its true(er) value.
- If the last 14,399 acres were properly valued based on ecological worth, scarcity, and true market adjustments, they would be worth $10 billion.
- If the 14,399 acres of Blackland Prairie were sold at a typical suburban development rate ($132,300 per acre) they would be worth $1.9 billion.
- The U.S. government subsidizes fossil fuels by over $20 billion a year. Imagine if even 5% of that went toward preserving irreplaceable land like the Blackland Prairie. You could preserve 14,399 acres ten times over.
- This pricing failure benefits buyers who enter at low price, rely on structural appreciation, and externalize environmental losses to taxpayers.
While San Antonio's Blackland Prairie holds a true economic value of $17 per square foot, it’s still being sold off for pennies. If scarcity were properly priced, these last remnants would be nearly untouchable.
Here’s an underutilized opportunity: use true scarcity as the price gauge not speculation, not infrastructure, and definitely not what the land lacks.
I get being on sale every once in a while but San Antonio’s been on clearance its whole life. Y’all never priced nature like the irreplaceable asset it is. And now, the very thing that makes you proud to be from Texas is almost gone.
There’s an ironic market failure at play: the more self-sufficient and ecologically valuable the land, the less it’s worth on paper. That’s because today’s valuation system rewards the absence of nature. Concrete, not clean air; sprawl, not soil.
We don’t reward land that provides flood control, mental health, and biodiversity, we discount it. And in doing so, we turn economic scarcity into ecological collapse.