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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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