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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

At my current company we're working on one of the problems involved in this in much of the developed world. Actually coming to the point where you can lay power lines is a huge issue that has to do with figuring out property ownership, the stuff that's already in the ground, water ways, roads, trees and more. People work months on finding a route that's actually possible and that sometimes involves paying a lot to property owners for using their land.

Right now we're creating a tool that gives the engineers insight into all these factors and automatically creates possible routes through all this madness. It's quite interesting to work on and fascinating to learn about all these complexities. It also doesn't scale well, we're building this for the Netherlands, which has a lot of centralized, (mostly) open data that can be used. In other countries that's not so much true.

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Why shouldn't the property owners be paid for a profit taking enterprise to functionally steal their land? I understand that it has to be done to make the world work but it absolutely disproportionally effects rural people while the benefits go to the urban areas. This is one of those situations where a percentage of those gains flow back into the rural areas.

I don’t think he said they shouldn’t get paid.

He is just saying that sometimes the best solution/route is over private property where the owner gets paid.

Correct. It's also not just about the money, it also takes a lot of time and adds a large amount of uncertainty to a project. Not every owner is willing to comply, causing an entire route to have to be reconsidered, which takes a lot of time. Eminent domain is pretty much never used, because judges (in my country) will pretty much always side with the property owner, unless the utility can proof that there's really no other way (which they almost never can).

So on a 10km+ route with hundreds of properties, multiple municipalities or other public organizations and other utilities, this gets really complicated really quickly.

Eminent domain being “pretty much never used” is a bold face lie in the US.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/local/2023/04/04/bullitt...

Here’s a story from this week where a gas company took land from a forest to build a pipeline that the previous and current landowners had no interest in selling to the gas company.

I'm not in the US, hence me explicitly writing 'in my country', because I'm aware that more countries exist and that things aren't the same everywhere.

That's so bizarre. In my country only the government can force you to sell them your land under eminent domain.

Insane that in the US, companies can use eminent domain as well.

Much of the activity stems from a disastrous Supreme Court ruling a couple decades ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

A lot of farmland and lovely homes have been unprotected since. Many Americans wish for this case to be revisited (if they know about the case.)

While Kelo was IMO a bad decision, it's also not the case that eminent domain is routinely exercised at low cost and effort in the US. Private property owners routinely block many types of development on their land and adjoining land. People like to decry NIMBYism all the time. I suspect building an interstate highway system in the US today would be effectively impossible.

ADDED: And, in general, exercising eminent domain should be hard. One can simultaneously believe it should exist and have a lot of safeguards against exercising it.

Eminent domain for a public road is one thing. Forcibly taking land for a private company to make profits on is entirely different and not comparable. That is the part I object to the most.

> I suspect building an interstate highway system in the US today would be effectively impossible.

The government should be able to take whatever land it needs for a highway, railway, etc. When we're talking about public infrastructure, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one landowner.

Perhaps the reward isn't enough if it is that difficult to get permission. Landowners near me compete for cell tower leases because it is absolutely worth it. I suspect profit sharing on the electricity sold through the line would grease the wheels a bit.

Perhaps landowners have unreasonable negotiating leverage when a small number who have little to gain or lose can stop a project that is worth billions to society as a whole.

If you need to get permission of thousands of people, and any single one can hold up the entire endeavor, then the economically rational thing to do is to be the last holdout, as you will get paid a lot more. Everybody loses in that scenario except the holdout.

Negotiations can be done en bloc but the downside is that it may take decades to do anything big.

In the US, class action lawsuits allow multiple entities to be rolled into a class to sue another party. Is there an equivalent in the other direction (i.e., could a utility company roll everyone into class)? I see lots of possible problems (i.e., class participation allows opt-out).

The dynamic of class action lawsuits isn't about the quantity of class members, but rather that they're unenumerable. As such they don't really make sense to apply to defendants, and would have terrible results if they were.

A plain old suit with many enumerated defendants would work for this topic though, assuming there was a cause of action.

That is exactly my point. Everyone gains massively except the poor guy who has to live with the problem. You don't see something terribly wrong with dumping your problems on random people just because they happen to live out of your sight? If society gains billions then surely you can spare some percentage of that gain to lift up the rural areas and people. Instead the coasts look at us like rubes and treat us with distain while we feed them and get our land forcibly taken. It seems like such an attitude would eventually cause a political rift in such a society.

The problem isn't that the little guy has too little say under the current system, but far too much.

That cost comes out of the pocket of everyone else who has to pay more for electricity. As such it isn't good for society to allow high prices.

Land owners do need compensation, but we need to be careful to not let that compensation be any higher than it must be.

Is it really not good for society to allow high prices? A high price on electricity would lead to consideration of alternate solutions, such as just not doing the thing which requires it or local power generation. The problem we have is that negative externalities aren't priced into fossil fuel alternatives

An advantage of increased awkwardness in dealing with local landowners would be that local organisations are incentivised to arrange a solution voluntarily, strengthening the local community, such as community owned and administered infrastructure that was constructed without government having to use eminent domain

They pay one time pennies for land and run billions of dollars of value across it. It is insulting.

Power companies have done this in the past; there still exist farms that have perpetual free power from an agreement back in the rural electrification days; we get a right-of-way for the power lines, you get free power.

It's often much easier for the power companies to just negotiate with the city/state to use the already existing road right of ways, even if that's longer.

In countries that do not have a cadastral property register, it may not be simple to go from "GPS location" to "mailing address to offer to pay the owner for access to their land"; finding that can be a substantial cost in itself.

It's a multi-player prisoner's dilemma. Say you need the co-operation of 1000 landowners.

- Everybody co-operates, everybody gets paid a little bit.

- One or two people make unreasonable demands, the builder caves and they get paid a lot.

- Several people make unreasonable demands, nobody gets paid.

It's more complicated than that because multiple routes are always considered simultaneously, but the basic large number non-iterated prisoners dilemma problem applies.

>unreasonable

I think therein is the issue. Who is to say that the small piece of property isn't worth the "unreasonable" amount to that owner?

My home is worth $X on the market, but I don't want to sell it. Why shouldn't it be worth 10 * $x if a company wants to buy it from me? Why should I be forced to sell?

It's the time-old public/private issue; with money it's easier because it's fungible. Eminent domain has existed for millennia; this is just an aspect of it.

In general the common result seems to be that for the "public good" the government has relatively large leeway (+/- political pressure) for things like roads, freeways, transit, utilities, etc.

The line gets blurred when some of those are technically for-profit companies like some (many) utilities are. Often the end result is relatively fair for "everyone" but still the landowner is most affected (things like requiring power lines to be buried, or the power company has to build a driveway for the land owner, etc can happen). At extremes you have "town eminent domains your house so Walmart can build a parking lot on top of it."

Some cities plan very far in advance and basically put a "we will buy this property when the landowner dies" lien on it; and wait out the 30-50 years before doing the project.

For reference, here's how we used to do things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataloochee_(Great_Smoky_Mount...

>In the 1920s, the increase in tourism and the destructive effects of logging gave rise to a movement to create a national park in the Smokies. For this to happen, the residents living in the proposed park boundaries would either have to sell their land or be forced out via eminent domain. In 1928, Reverend Pat Davis broke the news to the residents of Cataloochee at Palmer's Chapel, telling them the valley was within proposed park boundaries and that they would be forced to sell. Hattie Caldwell Davis, who was at the meeting, recalled women crying and men threatening to dynamite the roads and shoot anyone who tried to enter. Some men had the idea of blocking Cove Creek Gap so the government representatives would have to come in from the Tennessee side, where Mount Sterling residents would surely stop them.

It’s not unreasonable for extremely small portions of private land to be used for infrastructure, in the exact same way that easement rights are not unreasonable. You can’t buy all the land around my lot and tell me you value right-of-way on your property at $1 billion.

This is why the government has eminent domain authority. Either take a price that you feel is fair, or hold out and let the government decide what price is fair.

Eminent domain for a public use is one thing, stealing private land and giving it to a profit taking company just because you can is another.

Using eminent domain to run utilities is a quintessential use case for eminent domain. The owner doesn't necessarily need to be forced to sell the land, they could be forced to grant an easement instead. A utility easement is something almost every land-owning American has to deal with.

An easement that forever stops me from planting a tree or building a building is not simple ROW. It is a takeover of my property.

It's not exclusively your property, because it derives a large portion of its value from existing as part of a community.

A community that requires many shared goods: water, power, transit, sewage, waste disposal, etc.

Each of which require sacrifices to be made by all so that they can functionally exist.

Absolute ownership = no shared infrastructure can be constructed = everyone's land is worth less

They require sacrifices to be made by those who preserved land. I realize that we cannot have absolute ownership. What I see in practice is that farms and open spaces are run over roughshod. Road planners try to avoid tearing through businesses and neighborhoods while gleefully destroying a century old farm. It isnt a shared infrastructure or sacrifice and you know it.

A fair system would be blind to what is on the ground and build the lines or roads without regard to who owns it or what is in the way. Otherwise the poor and rural will always be looked at as cheap useless fools to be taken advantage of.

If you've got a bone to pick with planners, then you're drawing the wrong distinction.

They don't care about rural/farm vs urban/business.

They care about tax revenue and voters.

It's always going to be an uphill battle making the argument that $ tax revenue / acre farmland is more important than $$$ tax revenue / acre sub/urban use. And due to density that farmland represents one family of voters vs the >1 an equivalent urban footprint would impact.

The fact is that the rural US has benefitted from the US's very robust freight rail network, almost all of which was either taken via eminent domain or before the land was parceled out.

If we tried to rebuild the train network we have today using the protracted legal process we have for reallocating land, it would be 100% impossible.

The rail network is a big part of the reason we're in this mess, though.

The "checkerboard" system granted alternating squares of land to the railroad companies as an incentive to build out the network. The railroads sold those squares to various entities.

The result is that much of the public land in the Western United States is "corner-locked". There are two parcels, diagonally adjacent, but a new easement would be required to cross between them.

Even if you could get the corner easement you'd be running lines that zig-zag all over the place, so now the private owner can extract whatever the savings are for a straight line.

https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/corner-crossi...

This seems like a completely unrelated implementation detail.

Seriously. The government could have just leased rights to the land for 100 years to the railroad companies.

We don't need to go full PRC, we can just make land grants that make geometric sense.

If the concern is getting multiple companies to cooperate and preventing them from accumulating too much land/power, leases are a good solution.

Land leases are not bad things just because the PRC happens to use them. The USG leases a crapload of land to companies for various profitable enterprises. It's a tool in the toolbox.

> I understand that it has to be done to make the world work but it absolutely disproportionally effects rural people while the benefits go to the urban areas.

This seems like a bit of a stretch. The usage of extremely tiny portions of rural land for infrastructure pales in comparison to the ludicrously large subsidies of rural areas by urban areas.

> ludicrously large subsidies of rural areas by urban areas

Which subsidies are you referring to? The department of agriculture does have subsidies, but they measure in the (<10) billions which I don’t think we can call ludicrously large in comparison.

I'm mostly just talking about tax revenue versus public spending, since that's probably the easiest to get objective numbers for. But of course it's still going to depend on where you draw the line between "urban" and "rural" (I would probably want to look at dense urban centers versus everything else). With a quick Google you can find a bunch of studies showing that urban areas subsidize rural areas as well as a bunch of articles "debunking" those studies, so I'm sure anyone can find the conclusion they were looking for.

There is also subtler stuff that isn't exactly "subsidy" but is perhaps suggestive of societal conflict between urban and rural areas, for example vastly disproportionate political representation (in the United States).

They should absolutely get paid (and they are in most civilized countries). But they shouldn't have a veto right. I private ownership of land is a weird concept anyway.

They get paid a pittance compared to the value of what is provided.

In from the Netherlands too,can you find me the company name? I think someone is interested in this as well.

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