Who gets to own the West? | Hacker News Reader

Who gets to own the West?

nytimes.com

77 pointspseudolus67 comments

> Among the nation’s top landowners are Mr. Malone, with 2.2 million acres in New Mexico, Colorado and other states;

To give a sense of perspective, 2.2 million acres is a 94 km by 94 km square (or 59 by 59 miles). Approximately equivalent to a single person owning all of Cyprus or Puerto Rico.

Add two more people from that paragraph, and between the three of them, they own more land than all of Israel.

Location, location, location!

As a point of comparison in the other direction, the federal government owns 34.5 million acres in Idaho alone.

Isn’t the federal government at the very least supposed to embody the will of it’s people?

I’ve no problem with my nation owning a lot of the land within its borders.

You certainly didn’t make any particular point on the subject but I’d rather we own than one person owns.

My point wasn’t so much about whether it’s right or wrong for private landowners to own that much land. It’s that the western continental US is really big (and empty) as compared to Cyprus or Israel.

Yea, well that’s absolutely a fact I feel acutely whenever I have to cross the darned thing for work!

While it isn't the most pressing issue in the article, a quote that jumped out at me is: "For years, he assumed the road was public..."

Public land in the West isn't well-marked, and the difference in usage rights between private, state, and federals lands is not well understood by the general public, and sometimes not possible to know without recent data from the managing organizations regarding current permits and claims on various parcels. I've been thinking for years that I should write an app that reads your location, looks up related data, and tells you exactly what land you are on and what the allowed uses are. Especially out in the Western wilderness areas when you may be crossing into different parcels and walking in and out of various mining and mineral claims without even realizing it.

That guy was using the road for access to public land. It doesn't necessarily matter who owns the land under a road because the use of the road is supposed to offer access rights. The problem is the guy doesn't have enough money to take on billionaires to assert his access rights.

It abolished be pretty cheap to prove the easement by default or if official.

Totally agree, and that is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to call out - because land ownership is just the first step in knowing what you can and cannot do on that land. There are many other factors.

Likewise, sometimes mining claimants believe they can keep people off their claim, which isn't the legal reality - they have the rights to the materials on the land, not exclusive access. Yet another reality of the West is that you don't argue legalities with the prospector who is holding a gun on you telling you to go away.

> the prospector who is holding a gun on you telling you to go away.

That would qualify as assault [1], and should result in the prospector going to jail. But if the US legal system worked as it should, it would be almost completely unrecognizable...

[1] https://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2016/01/is-it-a-crime-to-p...

The hard part is getting the data together cheaply enough that you can sell it to consumers.

This seems like a feature that will eventually be baked into onX, which I happily pay for. Right now though it only draws a distinct line between public/private in my state and some public parcels (like city or land trust owned property) appear as private land. Still after a while you get a good sense of whether the parcel is accessible by the name alone.

https://www.onxmaps.com/

Oh, that is terrific! I didn't know this existed, and may very well happily pay for it myself. Thanks for sharing it!

I love OnX. Between it, and the USFS PDF maps (which can be keyed to GPS using other free apps), I've been able to do a bunch of exploring.

For example, last December, I drew a tag for the Whetstone mountains in AZ. The primary route that everyone used into the western side of the mountain range was a 2.5 hour drive in from the far west, with significantly challenging terrain toe cross. However, between OnX and the USFS maps, I was able to find a route from the south that had an unmarked, but official, USFS service road through private property.

Without that kind of info, I would never have even thought to approach the gate into the property (other hints at arrival help - there was a USFS placard saying to keep gate closed). It saved me dozens of hours of travel during the trip as we were staying in a nearby town.

Nice, I use it mostly for finding river frontage in Maine that I can access for fishing. Maine also has a ton of land trusts and conservancies, so I will use it to map out their borders.

Hope you filled that tag!

I've thought the same thing and then realized the impossibility of it. The reason being, in most western states, there are tens of thousands of patented mining claims. When a claim gets patented, it is private property, including both mineral and surface rights. Lode claims, the most common, are 10.66 acres. I was trying to find the boundaries of a lode claim, knowing which quarter (160 ac) it was in. I ended up finding an old mineral survey marker for one corner of the claim and nothing else. So making an app that lets hikers skirt around private property is going to be quite imperfect unless things are resurveyed with modern technology, a huge and expensive undertaking.

I got in an argument last year with a pissy middle manager at Boeing about where I was parked.

The spot was unmarked, un-gated, on a road with a stoplight at the intersection, and I was having engine trouble. This little man told me the road was private property, and I had to move my truck immediately.

I ended up getting banned from Battlebots last year over that situation.

Land taxes will curb the billionaires, make the land have a carrying cost

That is the problem. Land owners don't pay property tax on land that they have placed a conservation easement on.

https://www.landtrustalliance.org/topics/taxes/income-tax-in...

I'm OK with this - I would rather financially incentivize them to conserve their lands, instead of making them feel they need to monetize it to cover a tax bill.

I'd like it better if they were required to allow public access. The public is paying for this land in lost taxes, we should be able to use it.

I agree, however I think a balance needs to be struck between liability and groundskeeping, as those are currently the costs that all municipalities cover for their public parks.

Something along the lines of retaining some or most of the tax benefits for the private owner, in exchange for the municipality covering grounds maintenance, and a split between both parties for the liability insurance.

I think that’d be the start of the US developing its own “Freedom to Roam” implementation.

So you end up with most of the land being a private park for the rich inaccessible for the rest.

Think about what it means 'their land'. The people have agreed that they will protect his exclusive right to use that land. They gave him a set of rights associated with it. There are other people these days for which there was no land left - thus making a price congestion for the existing land.

Shouldn't the current owner pay the tax as means of 1) congestion pricing and 2) service fee for others guaranteeing his rights?

It feels to me like a fair tax as you pay for what you use.

Additionally everyone should have the right to roam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

Can't have that though, people could end up in very dangerous places. I'll just say that the government probably has secrets. Hiding spots. Research projects. Etc etc. If you think governments aren't using the property of élites to squirrel things like that away you're being a bit naive. The last thing we'd want is some kid stumbling over some irradiated or bio-infested wasteland that happens to look really cool. Or maybe just seeing something they shouldn't?

Biltmore seems enormous, and far more than any family needed for a living space. But now we're starting to hear about things the government has done there over the years, and you get the sense that we've likely not heard about it all. And that's just stuff from the Gilded Age. Technology has advanced considerably.

If we are dead set on having a right to roam, then at the very least, you can't be able to sue the government or any landowner for any negative impact that you may incur by roaming. Like coming home and infecting your family or your school or whatever. A landowner should be able to post a sign that says, "danger: stay out" or something, and then you choose whether to stay out. But the consequences of the choice have to be on you. (But only for government type stuff. I don't believe a landowner should be able to lay booby traps for instance. But if the government has something going there, like at Biltmore? Well, they said "stay out", and you didn't. So that should be on you.)

Yes, I agree, the tax deduction is the fee that grants public access..

I see this is as a problem with wealth inequality and not land per say. A wealth gap leads to exaggerated levels of... you get the idea.

Of all the ways that wealth can be redistributed, land reform is arguably one of the most socially disruptive. I hope we don't get to this point.

At least we should have a law that people can pass through that land like they have in Scotland.

We'd need Senate and House representatives that represent the bulk of citizens in the US and not those catering to the ultra wealthy's whims.

For that, people would have to vote out a lot of existing politicians, pick fresh faces, and cycle them out regularly enough to make it difficult for a few private interests to buy them out. For some states there are incentives to keep the status quo because it helps them (Kentucky and Mitch McConnell in recent news come to mind), so those cases would be difficult to convince to dump out their representative because they provide just enough support to their states to appease residents.

Overall, there just doesn't seem to be momentum of voters to achieve this and every attempt I've seen has failed. Some of this is likely due to the orchestration/organization problem: it's a lot easier for a few thousand billionaires to converge on shared ideas than hundreds of millions of non-billionaries.

Instead, people shake their heads and go with the flow while complaining about the state of affairs and ongoing trends that hurt their interests and growth. The end result is the continued snowball of wealth inequality we see. I often wonder if we've passed a critical point of recovery within our governmental system to fix this issue but I certainly hope not.

Mitch McConnell should just start putting corporate logo patches on his suits.

I don't disagree but that should be extended to each and every member of Congress.

Cycling the legislators doesn't help at all - it's easy to make a farm team of lackies, already "bought" before they're even elected. They can even be picked according to ideology, so you don't have to pay them a dime.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/re-engineering-politician...

I don't know the solution to this problem, but it's not legislative turnover!

Agreed. There is this call for term limits but think it would have the opposite effect of what people want. If politics is not a long term career then politicians need to be either independently wealthy or keep a foot in the industry they worked in. That way it's pretty much guaranteed that they will be beholden to that industry and aren't independent.

We’re a majority-homeowner country. Property rights are immensely popular.

I'm thinking the politicians from anyplace that would be a problem are strongly disincentivized from making any such law. If a guy owns a big enough tract, then that's potential for a huge roads project to go around that tract. Roads projects mean money and jobs, lots of the former and lots, and lots of the latter. Jobs tends to mean votes. Especially in rural areas.

If anyone can just go through the land anyway, all of a sudden there is no need for any projects. At least no big one.

But maybe I'm just being cynical.

Well, in Scotland you only have the right to walk or cycle across other people's property - and with a number of restrictions (no damaging crops, no access to immediate vicinity or houses etc.).

Ah, I see. Yeah, that makes more sense. So they would still need a road. Also, you can't go up to someones house and walk around. Etc.

When I was in Scotland two years this was a breath of fresh air and “freedom”. In the US there are lots of areas where it’s really hard to hike because people close off their land completely. Or they mark the land as private and now you have to worry about getting shot or somethings.

I think you are overthinking this way too much. A right to roam would have no impact on road building or other public projects.

I'm from Texas originally and in Texas, well, you just don't go on other peoples land. But I grew up sharing a fence line with national grasslands and I naturally developed an affinity for public land.

A few years ago I learned about Hawaiis public ownership of the beaches when a friend took me to a locals secret spot in Kauai that we had to trespass to get to. The trail to get there represented a battle between landowner (a golf resort) and the trespassers, with big soil dumps to create steep descents and thorny bushes vines planted to make it difficult (or at least painful) to get to the cove. But on the other hand it was clear people had come through there with shovels and machetes to clear the way so people could access that beautiful beach. I imagine that battle is still being waged today.

Recently I moved to a state (Maine) with a more nuanced set of norms about private land use (for recreation and hunting/fishing both), Before I didn't realize there are places in the US where it's normal to access peoples private land without permission. I took a hunters safety course here and one of the things they reinforce over and over again is to get permission to hunt land. They even gave us booklet containing templates for getting signed permission to hunt land. It was unfathomable to me that you would hunt on someones land without permission. They also taught us that times are changing here and in a couple of generations this whole culture of public use of private lands will probably go away, so it’s important to be respectful so as not to hasten its demise.

I’ve come around to believing that nature ought to be seen and land should be used (in a respectful way). Just to be able to go on a hike and be in nature is a special kind of liberty.

Those Wilks brothers in the article represent a culture of fear and paranoia that is born of certain ideologies (religion, neoconservatism, etc). I imagine they can’t see the world in any other way. That Justin Wilks thinks recreating on his 300,000 acres is somehow equivalent to him camping on your front yard shows you how petty and slighted even billionaires can be.

I grew up in Sweden with extensive Freedom to roam rights where you can visit all the forest and lakes. But my view has gone in the opposite direction, as someone who loves being in nature I thought the idea was wonderful and I have spent so much time in nature picking mushrooms and nuts. It has been great for me and I respect nature and try to leave it as I found it.

Unfortunately I can't say the same for other people. I just keep seeing more and more trash around pretty lakes because people got there and have a party and just leave all the trash. I found piles of junk in the forest just to learn that people just dump it there because it's easy and free. The problem is that it's basically impossible to enforce the Freedom to roam rules about not leaving trash or cutting down trees and so on. Basically it is just free for all to dump trash and behave like people want because of the lack of enforcement.

At this point I really wish to own a forest but not in Sweden, I want to own it in a country where I have real property right were I can people away from it because I don't want them to ruin it. Sure I don't need 100,000 of acres but I still want to own forest and be able to keep people from using it without permission.

A better, longer term, structural solution to this is investing in education and fostering a culture of environmental awareness from childhood. Instead, in the US, we keep defunding the EPA and denouncing scientists sacrificing their lives to appease the needs of rich people to increase the value of their equity.

Do you think people don’t know that dumping and littering in nature is bad? There is an inherent selfishness at play, especially with little threat of punishment or shame.

A similar problem encountered in California is illegal pot grows in National Forest and even National Park lands. These growers deliberately introduce large quantities of rodent poison into the econsystem, divert streams, and dump trash in what is supposed to be the most protected and pristine federal land. And they do it for profit, or because, as they claim, their families back home would be threatened by a cartel.

How will education eliminate that problem?

What's not to love in the return of feudalism?

The irony of billionaires who made their money through fracking saying they have a 'responsibility to the land' is I hope not lost on anyone.

In either case, we're seeing a lot of previously public property essentially turn private and the results never seem to work out that well. From beaches being closed to retirees being pushed out of their homes, this sort of large-scale property ownership shifting seems to result in a net negative for the local community.

What beaches are being closed?

Martin's Beach, closed by Vinod Khosla.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/technology/california-bea...

One datapoint doesn't make a trend, though.

In Malibu they also try to close access to the beach with fake security guards and signs.

Pila'a Beach closed by Mark Zuckerberg

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/17/mark-zuckerb...

Three occurrences make a trend. And rich people buying up land near beaches and closing to the public has been happening more frequently that past few years.

I didn’t see this addressed in the article:

How much of this is snapping up land that will be a key value once rising water levels displace coastals?

This strikes me as a much stronger play than just buying up some land.

We are expecting 3-9 inches of sea level rise over the next century. Boise is at 2730 feet. The mountains where they are buying this land is even higher. What they are hedging is population growth and the continued migration west. Also people leaving California as it becomes too expensive. Buying land in the far north could be a global warming play as that area will be more temperate in future.

> Buying land in the far north could be a global warming play as that area will be more temperate in future.

Agreed. And it's a smart move. Buy up the land for pennies (on a billionaire scale) and sell the land back to developers for a huge profit when more and more people look for new homes in the area.

> Who gets to own the lands?

Common folks, hard-working, meek, idealistic folks; only when they're willing enough.

Middle class is the backbone of the world.

Woody Guthrie is rolling over in his grave.

I am amused by the comment that owning a private landholding will protect them should we hit a time of political and climate driven unrest. Yeah - a paper land deed will definitely stave off the masses hordes in the event of a desperate apocalypse. This is the right wing paranoid delusional equivalent of the Silicon Valley billionaires who dream of never dying by uploading their brains into computers circling Mars.

You just grant right of abode to a number of young men that know how to handle weapons. They'll be very motivated to defend it - and you! - from the hordes, especially given their families are residing there too.

There, you just reinstated feudalism, with barely any extra steps.

Why would the people you hire care what you think once society has collapsed to the point where money and contracts are worthless?

Exactly. The praetorian guard become the real emperor of Rome or the Shogun exiles the emperor to play ceremonial roles in Kyoto. Except in this case without the need to maintain a popular figure of divine mandate for public purposes, the guards just shoot the former billionaires. In the end there is no hedge against death or total societal breakdown no matter how rich you are.

This is mitigation up until total collapse.

> This is the right wing paranoid delusional equivalent of the Silicon Valley billionaires who dream of never dying by uploading their brains into computers circling Mars.

I hope this isn't a real thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com