Gold rarely appears in its valuable form in accessible natural settings. It is acquired through the costly process of mining, which increases its supply. So it is not like land with respect to either supply elasticity or the cost of initial acquisition.

>>a home is built on land which people form emotional attachments to

I would argue people should be encouraged to not form an emotional attachment to a house, because the land it occupies is part of a larger society which may come to need it more than the person does.

You may have grown up in a house your grandfather built, but the neighborhood of that house may have changed from a sparsely populated district of a small city, to the densely populated economic core of a major metropolis and regional shipping/trading hub. The land needs to be repurposed to benefit the greatest number of people, and I don't think a perpetual land claim stemming from the principle of first possession should trump that imperative.