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Comment by Uke | Hacker News Reader

The government should own it. All infrastructure like that should be in a nations hand.

Ah yes, the government has never completely botched prime real estate before, nor have they ever botched housing build projects.

Federal and state governments own large parcels of prime NYC, LA, SF, Chicago and other metro land, most of which is underutilized. As an example, they operate or sublease numerous surface level parking lots in those places.

The federal government owns a prime parcel on State Street in Chicago, prime real estate, that is completely abandoned. There are many examples of this.

Your solution is to place this responsibility into the hands of those who have shown complete and utter incompetence across successive administrations?

Yes. My solution is also been shown to work in countries like Switzerland [0], makes the areas around train stations way more livable and return the gains back to the entire populace. I'd even go so far and make the sourrounding area unsellable but leased out for 99 years. Perhaps it's also a mentality difference between EU and US. We guys in the old world aren't (in general) as hypercapitalists or distrustful/follow Reageanismns like “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”

[0] https://sbb-immobilien.ch/en/station-surroundings/

And then the government gets to decide who can lease that prime real estate next to the station? Sure, that won’t have any problems with corruption

Having a central arbiter of contested resources is literally the reason governments exist.

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