Which coincidentally is what most Americans can trace their deed back to, save a small fraction that was privately chartered by order of the king from the get go.
We ought to share our land with our youth to homestead, in this housing crisis. I had to build on truly terrible desert shithole land due to insane land prices (and even burnt out trailers were 150k+ so building a shack on vacant land was my only option), much worse than much of public land, I'd prefer others not have to suffer that.
I do sympathize, but this is just so incredibly short-sighted. And allowing politicians to enrich themselves (and their already rich developer/landlord buddies who caused the housing crisis) by selling us back what we already own is no fix at all. We really shouldn't set the precedent of letting politicians buy votes from us by temporarily alleviating the problems that they themselves have caused.
The east coast is already a concrete nightmare of conurbation and paved suburbs from Boston to Miami. If you live your whole life in Europe, at least there are proper villages, but it's pretty hard to get more than a few miles away from other people, even in the Alps. If you can get to the Amazon or the Sinai or the Kashmir, then you can enjoy some peace and quiet at the risk of running into soldiers/militants/narcos. In the neighborhood of Everest/Annapurna, roads and cell towers are on the rise. Or you can freeze your tits off in the great frozen north, or file detailed travel plans with China and struggle to arrange for transport to remote areas. The combination of accessible/inaccessible in the American west plus the relative stability is unique, it is a refuge, and this kind of thing is disappearing from the world.
We'll be much poorer if we give it up, certainly the future will be bleaker, even if some people feel like they are getting a sweet deal on the acreage.
Anyway, we all know that desert shacks will eventually want water and power, which is only going to be available if we slightly expand existing cities/townships. This is not great, because actually curbing relentless profiteering is ultimately a better fix than starting a new wave of it, but it's also not terrible. The bait-and-switch here is that removing protections on public lands is ultimately for companies that are interested in exploitative extraction, not for renters. If public lands are going to be used in that way, then at the very least it should be part of a way to fund basic-income or something. This is the way it works in Alaska (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund), and whether or not it's effective is a matter for debate, but at least it actually feels like trying to take a step in the right direction.
Perhaps there is a balance to be struck, but if our ancestors said what you're saying today we'd be in extremely dire straits and squashed into a tiny cluster of OG slivers of chartered land.
As you said, practically everything used to be public land, and yet we observe that a burned out meth trailer on .25 acres still costs a quarter million. So.. now you know exactly what happens if you decide to change nothing else and just privatize public lands. This fixes the problem for 1 guy maybe, who gets the dubious pleasure of paying a slightly less outrageous price and then shitting in a bucket for 20 years. Then that guy fucks over the next generation when they sell at the highest possible price that the market will bear and that increasingly desperate buyers can afford.
Why do we want to do more of that? What's the plan for growth when the future arrives and there's nothing else to steal from the public?
The omitted piece here is without discharging public lands .25 of marginal land on slivers of original chartered land would now likely be worth millions with nothing cheaper in sight. We noticed public discharge of lands had worked spectacularly well towards providing more land for homes and for cheaper prices. If we went by your criteria it would be a resounding 'sell it all' unquestionably.
>ell at the highest possible price that the market will bear and that increasingly desperate buyers can afford
Simple supply/demand dictated higher supply should lower prices all else equal
>his fixes the problem for 1 guy maybe
1 guy who improved the land, then dies/sells, this goes on and generations enjoy the compounding fruit of this.
And who says I want to change nothing else? The recipe I've found for success in a building a home for under 6 figures has many components
1) Use recently discharged or never developed former public land
2). No building codes or inspections, nor building plans or structural engineering. I took advantage of this to be able to DIY a home for $30k without having to deal with bureaucrats.
3) No licensing for trades. I saved lots by not dealing with unions or tradesmen gatekept by trades rackets.
4). Loose zoning
5). No public services. I built my own roads, with no tax funded road access, private septic, private water and utilities so that property taxes are near 0.
Using my recipe people can own homes+land for a couple years of typical full time middle age wages and pay practically no taxes on it