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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

I’m not American, so only have an outsider perspective, but I’m not convinced that’s possible in the US to do the same, because the country has a completely different perspective on individual rights. Land ownership seems to be seen as something sacred that cannot be infringed in any way, meaning a small group of people who own some parts of the land can block any development that would benefit the public at large

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This is mostly true until it's time to build an interstate.

Good luck building a bunch of new interstates today. Opposition was already coming in at the end of the interstate system buildout. Drill down and you'll find various odd connections (or lack thereof) throughout the system that resulted from community opposition.

land rights aren't exactly a constitutional right, but the 5th amendment makes it hard to take it, so in practice would probably require a constitutional amendment.

The 5th amendment isn't exactly recent. But a lot of factors make it harder--for better or worse--to exercise eminent domain today than in the past. You could probably never reasonably build the equivalent of the interstate highway system today. (Though even at the time, there were compromises made because of strong community pushback in some cases and there was less developed space than today as well.)

a small group of people who own some parts of the land can block any development

Almost all NIMBY opposition to development comes from people who do not own the land in question.

You’d think so, but in fact it’s almost the opposite! You can own your land all you want but your neighbor has a final say on what’s allowed on your land.

Eminent domain is designed for this. People are compelled to sell.

And you'd better be prepared to fight for it through the courts. Might take a decade or more if someone is really opposed to selling.

People say that but I’m not sure, it seems state of california manages to pull it off pretty well, thinking in terms of recent history it was used a couple years ago for highway expansion in bakersfield for example, using it on 900 homes. Pretty sure they must have used it recently in the owens valley when they widened 395 as well.

The US is the country that originated Georgism.

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