Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

The horrific reason for this figure is that owning a square in this ridiculous checkerboard is equivalent to owning 1/4 stake in the squares of public land that it's adjacent to. If you own four black squares on the checkerboard on all sides of a single white square, you also own the white square, because you are the only person who can legally pass through onto the public land.

By citing this figure, the plaintiffs are essentially admitting that they are claiming de facto ownership over the public's land.

View on HN

Indeed, the actual buying of land in a checkerboard like this with this obvious intent is the most cynical, greedy thing, and I assume the only reason the government sold them the land in that pattern in the first place is because the rules allowing that were written by someone in the pocket of the folks looking to do this practice.

Actually, it's a lot older than that and seems to have been an honest mistake. From the ruling [0]:

> History and politics have complicated the pattern of land ownership in the West. To promote western expansion in the nineteenth century, the federal government encouraged the construction of rail lines through the West by granting every other 640-acre parcel along rail corridors to a railroad company. The hope was that the lands remaining with the government would increase in value as the companies built rail lines, which the government would later sell at high prices. The plan was successful further east, but the government struggled to sell the lands in the arid West. The result of this failed venture is the checkerboard pattern of public and private land that now plagues much of the West.

[0] https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...

Thing is, nobody in the right mind back in 1850 or whathaveyou would have thought of "walking across private land to get somewhere" as some sort of civil or criminal trespass.

That's... how you got places.

If you actually damaged something -- broke a fence, stole a horse, dug a ditch, whatever -- then, yeah, you'd get in trouble if you got caught.

I heard from a friend that moved out to a rural area that especially the newcomers moving in from cities are super-sensitive about "their property". His neighbor -- from NYC -- threatened a lawsuit because my buddy's truck broke off some branches that extended out into the common road.

Folks that have been living out there awhile are cautious with outsiders, but overall a lot more neighborly, just because you have to be.

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

“The freedom to roam, or "everyman's right", is the general public's right to access certain public or privately owned land, lakes, and rivers for recreation and exercise. The right is sometimes called the right of public access to the wilderness or the "right to roam".

[…]

The access is ancient in parts of Northern Europe and has been regarded as sufficiently fundamental that it was not formalised in law until modern times.”

Very pleasingly, the "Land Reform Act 2003" in Scotland formalised this fundamental right: https://www.apidura.com/journal/freedom-to-roam-in-scotland-...

In Bavaria we have the problem, people like the country side, so idylic and romantic. Then they move, and all of a sudden the cows and church bells become a nuissance, not to speak of all the actual farm work going on.

To be fair, attaching a bell to a cow is animal cruelty and quite unnecessary nowadays. For the outrageous price of one cow bell you can also get RFID trackers for the whole herd. Or at least a handful of GPS trackers. And that also easily fixes the annoyance of cow bells.

Also, cows themselves are not annoying. What is annoying is their owners herding them over public roads and lands, having them shit everywhere without cleaning up. And that is pervasive in rural Bavaria, far more than in the reset of Germany.

You are not from Munich by any chance?

No? What would that have to do with anything?

I just wanted to check whether or not a beaten to death cliche was true or not.

Which one?

That it is usually people from Munich that complain about smells and noises in the, their words, pitoresque countryside.

That's also a problem in cities: people love the idea of living downtown in the old city center, close to cafes and stuff, and once they live there, they complain about the noise from those cafes.

Just think a minute about where you're moving to.

It's possible to install very-thick sound dampening curtains and various other sound proofing measures.

To the extent it wasn't intentional to allow it, you would think it would have been easily rectified as soon as it started being exploited, if not for corruption. Imagine if you went to the gas station and said you wanted to buy specifically the second, fourth, and sixth gallons out of the pump, and the first, third, and fifth would "coincidentally" need to go into your tank too, but you shouldn't have to pay for them. They would tell you to F off out of there because that's stupid. Yet apparently the federal government was happy to sell the land in this pattern. This is a problem even Ticketmaster solved trivially simply by not allowing you to orphan one seat in the middle.

I just re-read your post after initially replying having missed the important detail that the now-private parts are the plots originally granted to the railroads. My last reply here was made without grasping that. Are these "rail line" situations the only (or at least vast majority of) places where these public/private checkerboards exist? Or did the government actually sell other land in such a pattern at the request of the buyer?

The property planning department must have been fans of Go.

Ah the board game.

Took me way to long to figure out this wasn’t a subtle HN-dig at golang.

Those were the first two dots I was trying to connect as well.

Everyone I know who has tinkered with it loves it.

I don't know how much I enjoy the language per se, but I went to a talk on Go once and ended up married to the organizer.

I dislike golang the least among languages I have to code.

I generally don't like any programming language after I have tens of thousands of lines of it written

I apologise for making such a generic joke

All good. Generics are too new in Go for it to land.

A checkerboard pattern is a horrifically inefficient way to claim territory in go.

It might be useful to consider why checkerboards are good shape in legal systems, but bad shape in go. Also why the legal system rejected checkerboards after some thought, at least provisionally.

(historical rant: You might as well resign if your opponent is not also 30k. Who comes up with these analogies? People who have barely heard of the game, like 10ks or sth?)

Finally: yeah, Go is a bad analogy for this.

Go would be a halway analogy for two parties claiming checker-board plots aiming to deny access, if corner crossing isn't allowed.

The analogy breaks down because 'being allive' would require access to the edge, rather than having two liberties. Playing with such a different definition of life and death does seem like an interesting 'variation' of go.

What? You have conflated a thick pattern, checkerboard, with a special case, liberties at the edge.

You have mashed some words together and they do not make sense if you know what you are talking about.

Go is in so far a good analogy in that two stones that are only connected diagonally, aren't really connected. You can cut through them. And you should. Just like there hunters.

Let me extend my rant, please, around bad analogies and go.

A diagonal connection is a very thick connection. The major complaint about this connection is that it is not efficient; hearing someone say that the stones are not really connected is, once again, just hearing that you are 30-20k. I am being generous about 20k.

If only Settlers of Catan had been around for longer, maybe our property planners wouldn't be in this mess.

Our backyard backs onto a green space. The only way someone can get to the green space is to walk through our backyard or parachute in. Effectively our yard goes from 1/2 acre to 1 acre when including the green space. Basically we have taken ownership of it since only we can access it. It is definitely a selling point for the house.

Apparently not anymore because corner crossers have precedent.

No. This ruling doesn’t say you can walk through the backyard. If you can jump over it without touching the privately owned ground, it’s applicable.

Based on this ruling and the cited prior case law I would not want to take that to court. It's fairly clear that the govt will uphold public access to public land, with a fallback of eminent domain (seizure for fair compensation) of private land in order to facilitate public access.

A prior case has a situation where the govt seized land to build a road to allow public access. The ruling was that the govt could not do such a thing without fair compensation.

What about the other 3 sides of the green space? Or does your backyard encircle it like an enclave?

There is a creek on one side. On the other side of the creek is more green space and another house. On either side of our house are other houses that back up to their own slices of the green space. Everyone has an agreement that we won’t go into anyone else’s part of the green space. Other people don’t have a way to access the green space without going through someone yard. Technically at either end they could get into the green space, but there is a forest without any paths and lots of blackberry plants and poison Ivy blocking the way. In all the years we’ve lived here, I’ve never seen anyone attempt it.

How did these checkerboards come about? I've noticed them on maps before when looking for public land in the US.

IIRC, it was a way to push settlers farther to the West.

Looked like a clever idea at the time, likely.

It has to do with the way the federal government granted land to the railroads to incentivize them to lay track.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)

Railroad grants. The theory was that by granting land to railroads instead of money it incentivizes them to build the railroad well. By keeping half the land for the government the government profits from the increased value too. They just didn't think this far ahead.

I think it was a sound policy. The problem is that the government never decided to sell the land. If they fold it to individuals, those people can put in easements to access their land but that never happened

But how were the railroads supposed to lay track from one of their squares to the next without this "corner crossing"?

The land on which the railroad was built was handled separately. This was land in the vicinity of the proposed railroad, which would increase significantly in value if and only if a functional railroad was completed.

That explains why it was split up, but not why in a square grid. It sounds like the "corner" issue could have been avoided by using a hexagon pattern, right? That way corners are only shared by sections that also share a side. Then again, I haven't been able to convince my friends that using a hexagon grid for our tabletop RPG games is worth it despite the advantages seeming obvious to me (no need for weird rules about moving diagonally), so I suppose this would have been a hard sell to the late 19th century government as well.

In the 19th century no one would so daft as to think ownership of a random plot of land would give you the right to keep people from traversing it. Someone cutting down your trees, hunting, grazing their cattle or sheep, mining, farming it, yes. Just walking across it? They'd think you were a loon.

I don’t know, blocking people off “your land” goes back centuries. Probably millennia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts

Yep, this law was mentioned in the article as something the defendants cited

Many European countries still have freedom to roam. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

And having grown up in Norway, I feel Americans talking of "land of the free" while allowing landowners to block off even their own land is offensive on the face of it.

The ridiculous lengths these hunters had to go to in order to avoid straying onto private land is antithetical to freedom (you still need hunting licenses in Norway; and permission to hunt on private land so there are still potential issues, but worrying about a few meters and the accuracy of GPS to avoid even crossing a tiny little portion of private land is not one of them).

But how do you build a railroad from one square to another without part of the railroad ending up on any of the squares you don't own?

Also, isn't this somewhere in the mountains where there are no railroads?

The land wasn't granted to build railroads on, it was granted in payment for the railroads. Towns would naturally spring up near the railroads, and both the government and the railroad companies could then sell the land to people who would live on it, farm it, ranch it, etc.

Came about from the Land Ordinance of 1785 introduction of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) used by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management).

Office types gridded up manifest destiny using squares within squares and created a pre GPS coordinate system for coding up space (within central north america).

See (as starting points).

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

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/do-us-topos-and-national-map-have-...

While I'm not from that part of the world I spent a few years writing interop transformations betwixt all manner of "coord systems" across the globe that predate WGS84 et al.

The PLSS grid explains the locations of many midwest US roads and townships, and "checkerboard ownership" (families | businesses buying land to surround other land and then deny access to land not paid for) was one form of early system gaming.

The checkerboard pattern was explicitly the form of land grants to railroad companies to compensate them for laying track across the country. Early national equity compensation :)

Sure .. after the land parcels and ennumeration scheme had already been laid down .. and not limited to rail grants - there was a general US pattern of checkerboarding all land grants to disperse development.

The foundational aspect to the question posed is that land was gridded in abstract from afar before any aportions were made, a secondary aspect was that in some regions large tracts of those squares were initially granted to various railroads on an "every second large chunk" basis, another aspect was that in the days of open cattle grazing early land cattle barons realised they didn't have to own land to graze on it and they could control access to unowned land by only paying for surrounding land or for "chokepoint" land in rough terrain.

A 'final' aspect to the story is the creation of the US National Parks movement which started a wave of "freezing" as yet unsold land as permanently held as not for private use.

A key point is that the Land Grant Act of 1850 granted checkerbordered land to railroad companies within at most 50 miles of planned rail routes .. however that practice wasn't limited to rail grants - Tribal lands were also checkerboarded by the Dawes Act and public land was released on a checkerboard basis.

You can see the checkerboard ownership even in early cattle country that had no history of railroad grants - the large squares were the unit of sale and typically the early sales were for homesteads in the midst of unclaimed land with the next sale not being "right next door" but for another homestead block in the midst of unclaimed land.

It's the appeal of owning your house, shed, assets, yards, etc. while not having to pay to own the land your cattle are moved through for seasonal pastures.

Eventally all land would presumably have been purchased .. but the National Parks started freeing things up.

There's more on this (but not the complete picture) in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)

> You can see the checkerboard ownership even in early cattle country that had no history of railroad grants

That’s interesting, there are places where public/private checkerboards emerged naturally? The wiki link only tells the land-grant and reservation part of the story.

There were also "released for public sale" checkerboards practices and tribal reservations that were checkerboarded.

I had a better grasp and notes on this in the late 1990s, if you read the wikipedia page closely I seem to recall they make brief passing reference to both Homestead and Dawes Acts (~ 31st congress (?) era IIRC).

The railroad grants were the largest best known example by a long shot I believe, however not the first or only example and all based on an ealier gridding abstraction and a practice of encouraging development to spread out.

There's an intertwining of rich private interests and public policy .. people with entire full PLSS squares were able to influence land release patterns and the idea of vast endless "untouched" lands where you weren't forced to have neighbours had appeal.

It is a bit easier with parcels that touch at corners, but that isn’t unique to using a checkerboard. With almost any way you cut land into parcels, people can surround a plot with land they own.

Also, this doesn’t require a single owner to own those black squares. It could also be four individual owners, each building a (virtual or physical) wall on the border of their land.

Because of that, I expect that any civilized country has laws that give land owners and their visitors the right to reach their land, so that they can benefit from owning it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_way)

There is some kind of hilarious circularity to this. It's almost comparable to founding a publicly-traded company which asserts that its principal source of profits will be shaking down doubters through the legal system, and then suing anyone who indeed expresses doubts for damages based on the expected loss in stock value if the company were to fail to bring or lose that very lawsuit.

(Is this an appropriate model for certain "reputation economy" actions that exist in many human societies, like duels over perceived slights to one party's physical prowess?)

By this logic of five squares, wouldn't that reduce the value by 20%

This ranch apparently consists of quite a few squares in a complicated pattern, but even if it were just the four it wouldn't end up being exactly 20% because you would have to factor in the partial ownership of every adjacent public square, not just the one you surround completely.

Looking at the map in the article, it looks like it is pretty much a checkerboard. Ie. Half is owned, half is not. So you'd expect a 50% reduction (minus a couple of percent for edge squares which are not yet enclosed)

Which article has a map of this ranch? I've been looking but haven't found one.

EDIT: I finally found maps in the opinion:

https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...

Inset on the left, about a third of the way down

It's a blurry map, but seems to show this ranch (in yellow)

Oh, yeah, I saw that one, but I wouldn't try to draw any conclusions from it. It's a link to another article[0] that provides the map with a proper caption:

> The area around Elk Mountain is surrounded by a checkerboard pattern of public (yellow) and private (white), as well as state (blue) lands.

So the yellow is actually the public land, and it's unclear how much of the white is actually the ranch in question and how much is just other private land.

[0] https://www.hcn.org/issues/54.3/north-public-lands-why-four-...

wow I didn't think they meant checkerboard pattern literally. I'd be interested to know why the land was partitioned that way across such a wide area

I remember looking at old Metsker maps of Washington counties when I was a kid and wondering about all those checkerboards of green and white land. My dad told me the green was public land, and couldn't really explain why it was divided that way. So it is, literally, divided up like a checkerboard. Wikipedia has an enlightening article on it [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)

You can see this pattern all across the west, a result of land grants meant to subsidize railroad development. The federal government platted all the land into sections, then gave every other section along each new rail corridor to the developer. The idea was to encourage the creation of higher-quality infrastructure, by motivating the railroad to increase the value of their land holdings, instead of simply laying track as cheaply as possible like they might do if they were paid by the mile.

Here:

https://www.hcn.org/issues/54.3/north-public-lands-why-four-...

or here:

https://i.imgur.com/W3FhYz0.jpg

Wow, that’s wild! When I heard about this case, I assumed the rancher owning diagonally-adjacent lots was a rare edge case. From the map, it looks like this strange situation was intentionally created at large scale. Anyone know why?

Mostly from railroad land grants in the late 1800’s. Land along routes was checkerboard divided, odd lots stayed feds, even went to railroad companies.

I was originally remembering a time period when the railroad virtually had public domain authority to seize private lands, but the history of the land grants in Nebraska is actually much worse: https://nebraskastudies.org/en/1850-1874/railroads-settlemen...

Canada did the same.

The company building the railroad was paid not only in cash, but also land (which was suddenly very valuable next to a transcontinental railway).

But to avoid giving them all the prime spots, the checkerboard system was put in and they were given 50%, so the other 50% could be purchased by anyone.

It’s a known way of gaming the system (mostly), and seems like the state and county is generally a fan too, since the owners are pretty rich (and likely curry favors locally), and the public land is federal, so not ‘theirs’.

Trying to interpret your words here - is this a situation where the landowner has to pay the government for the part they own, or pay taxes on it or something, and the checkerboard pattern reduces the payment while giving them effective ownership over the whole area? Maybe the locals are sort of scamming the feds?

It’s a bit indirect. The private land is worth a lot more if they can connect contiguous lots, expressly or implicitly.

It would cause a huge uproar if the fed sold the land, but this allows them to defacto ‘capture’ it as long as no one asserts the right laws.

By stopped the public from accessing the intervening public land, it defacto gives them ‘ownership’ (as in they can do what they want with it) on the federal public land, but without having to pay for it, pay taxes on it, etc.

These rural areas are typically pretty poor, and the private land owners usually have no issues influencing county and state level politics. The county this is happening in (Carbon County) has a hair under 15k people in it, and a median income of $62k. Wyoming overall has a population of $ 570k and most of them live in 1-2 cities.

Dropping $1m in Washington DC will barely make a dent lobbying wise. Spreading the same over the Wyoming and Carbon County gov’t would be… quite powerful.

So if each private section erects a square-shaped pillar which has a side of ~3 feet at each corner, would that be both legal, and sufficient to prevent people from crossing?

Alternately, a tall fence?

No. As the article explains, it's illegal to physically block access to the land, and it's legal to climb over man-made obstacles like fences.

No, the judge said, you can cross the corner as long as you don’t step on the private land. The land owner may not create a physical obstacle at that corner. And if there is one, you are allowed to scale it to get to the other side of the corner.

It would be pretty hilarious if the land owner here gets charged in connection with blocking access to public land with the chains.

Similarly, I wonder if there is any room for suits over valuation of land predicated on the exclusive use of inaccessible public land. Someone at some point has definitely advertised this as a plus of owning the adjacent land.

It's reasonable the first infringing corner reduces the value more than the last, just like the first N miles reduce car value more than the last N

Not all land is of equal value. Having exclusive access to your own public area that is not going to be developed, could be that ammenity is worth a lot; further it makes the area effectively more contiguous. All is to say the sum can be worth more than the parts.

After admitting this, the judge should fine the landowner the $7 million he illegally tried to appropriate.

apparently you've never heard of an easement.

Like Go, but for landlords. ;-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com