Hacker News Reader

Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com