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Comment by randommuser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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