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Comment by normloman | Hacker News Reader

If I had the money, I'd buy all 400 of these villages, and demolish them (save for a few historic buildings). Let them turn back into forest.

Then I'd identify one village that was a good candidate for development. Start a new town with high density housing, walkable streets, and greenways. Require a green building code. Design great public transit. Eventually, ban cars. I would name this great city "Normville," after myself.

399 villages spared from sprawl!

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They are already being "eaten" by the forest. Luckily, most of them are quite biodegradable: just stone and wood.

I'm not buying the land to remove the houses. I'm buying the land so developers can't get their hands on it.

Oh, then you don't need to buy them, just wait a while. With very few exceptions (mostly a few "ecohouses" for foreign tourists), no developer touches those villages with a ten foot pole. Between the desertification of the region, the crashed real estate market and the cost of rebuilding those houses, the average return is probably between "terrible" and "catastrophic".

Not to mention the qualification of "... if the ownership rights were determined." Nothing like making a substantial investment and then -- if you actually turn it around -- having a couple dozen claimants pop up suing you for illegally occupying their ancestral/childhood lands.

Yeah, like I wrote in another comment, I'm personally expected to inherit ~1/52 of a small piece of land ;)

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