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Comment by bix6 | Hacker News Reader

I go back and forth on this. I love the idea of preserving land but this also seems to be a way for the wealthy to insulate their home eg buy 10 acres next to your house and declare it undeveloped. Now you get an amazing property in a pristine zone that nobody can touch all while getting a tax break you don’t need and boxing out the next generation.

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"Boxing out the next generation" is exactly what the law is for. I guess we have to decide whether we want more natural wilderness or more luxury homes with nice views.

The only way I can think of to preserve the wilderness without any isolated homes for the wealthy is for the government to buy up the land. I'd probably support that, if we could get it done, but it does mean that if the money for it comes out of the general fund, then you probably have average people paying for more of it, instead of mostly the wealthy.

Boxing out the next generation with environmentalism as the excuse.

This is also a massive problem in BC; the ALR exists to do exactly this. There's lots of land available, it's just illegal to build anything other than a farm on it, and the real estate market is as a consequence as usurious as you'd expect it to be.

Of course, none of this is new. Enclosure predates the Romans.

See I’m more happy with the gov doing it and making it a park but when someone rich gets to carve out a special little haven for themselves it doesn’t seem as fair. If we increase the tax rate on HNWI then they will still mostly pay for it.

The appropriate countermeasure is to allow upgrading land that is sufficiently near an urban area if it will be used to build above a certain density, e.g. 2000 homes per square kilometer. That's already denser than most urban areas in the US, so it wouldn't create sprawl in the sense that we're used to seeing it.

So many problems with real estate come down to "got mine, fuck you" ordinances.

If you want to see the actual mechanisms and debate, Boulder, Colorado did this with a belt of “open space” in the 1980s. One consequence was that it brought natural parts of that land close, which includes wildfire.

I love how we are trying to make decisions for our descendants. Just like historical buildings.

Another way of looking at it is that we're preserving things for our descendants.

Or locking them out of options. Why not let them do it? It’s their world. We all like to complain about boomer control of society but whose to say in 50 years we get looked down upon for this stuff.

It reminds me of all the desert shithole land I looked at that had covenants created by a dead boomer back in the 80s that require something ridiculous like "we will only allow a mansion to be built next to our pigfarm."

In theory it's possible to reverse but in practice it requires something like standing on one foot, holding your breath, and reciting the entire bible.

People desperately need housing and even in bum fuck nowhere where I live they are desperate to build a little homestead just so they can have something, and then you have this insanity with people creating covenants that basically have dead people in their graves reaching out to smite living people.

Isn't this (covenants that basically have dead people in their graves reaching out to smite living people) exactly what the dead hand rule was created to prevent? This was a major part of the "defeudalization" that took place between the 17th-19th centuries in most of western Europe, as before then the nobility would entail their estates so as to keep them whole in the senior male line. It does allow for limited postmortem control, but practically not more than one human lifespan thereafter.

C.f. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

Yep this is my concern. They get the (desirable) land / homes and nobody else ever gets to live there.

Outside of cities, land is already zoned like this. R5, R10, Ag20, Ag100, etc.

You don't even have to be particularly rich, you just have to be willing to live in the country.

I mean, this is the entire intent. It lowers your resale value quite a lot too though, since it's not open for development.

I was moderately interested in a property in the middle of nowhere that had about 8 acres buildable (with two structures on it already) and about 220 acres of forest and a lake under a very strict conservation easement. It would have been the only property of that size and type I could even dream of affording. It was still expensive, but less than a million dollars where if that 230 acres had not been under conservation easement in the same area it'd have sold for over 10.

And it's not like indefinite means forever forever. If the next generation 4 generations from now decides these easements are not in their best interest they will be repealed. It's just a piece of paper in the end.

All the while foxes, deer and birds can still develop their dwellings there. Blatant disregard of the law, I say.

Yeah come on it only takes a year and a little donation to get permits! Just stand in line little fox.

Try $50k and 1-3yr. More if you're doing something other than residential. You can thank the EPA for that. Can't do get approval without a plan for the stormwater. Can't do that without engineers. Engineers won't draw and stamp without surveys and the like.

Mega-corps building cookie cutter subdivisions or commercial space obviously pay less because they're vertically integrated and highly streamlined.

Some small scale 1-4 unit stuff (single structure here and there) is exempted, unless it's too close to water of course.

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