Give every US citizen 2 acres of land.

Hierarchies of preferred ownership baked in already?

 

Who will be approved?

Who possesses the skills to homestead?

How will the skills be learned?

Why is this being proposed?

 

Tax-free land...

Seems like this thread is the place to address that issue.

 

Well if someone wants to build a hunting lodge or nature retreat and someone else wants to farm, are you gonna place the farmer on land in the mountains and the hunter out in the empty prarie?

 

Im not opposed to applying sales tax to land purchased with state-issued currency. So its not 'tax-free'. Im just opposed to the govt being permanant landlord. There shouldn't be perpetually recurring taxes on things you own (perhaps commercial properties should be taxed, Im not sure there).

 

Im not sure. What would you propose?

Im not sure. What would you propose?

Im not sure. What would you propose?

I want more people to own their own home, ultimately. Those who want to, anyway. One way to promote that is to increase the amount of land thats available.

 

What makes you think that 640 million acres is "sitting unused"?

 

Read my first post plz.

 

~ Another idea : Give every American a gun and free training to learn how to use it.

~ Home ownership is the single best way to create individual responsibility and interest in community affairs and improvement .

 

I think purpose, exclusion/qualification and some real world application examples are needed.

 

I'm not sure owning two acres in central Alaska is going to do much for home ownership.

 

Agreed, but how would it work here?

Abatement? Deferment? Cancellation in some cases?

I'm not against the idea as a possible option in creating affordable housing & potential stability & wealth, but in and of itself...

 

Concur.

 

What is your intention in doing this - that really needs to be articulated.

It's a problem that needs to be addressed in whatever you're proposing.

Ditto.

A lot of people don't want to own; affordable housing is much more important than the illusion of ownership (taxes, mortgages & upkeep make real ownership a kind of illusion anyway). Location is key, as has been pointed out; access & numerous other amenities are crucial.

 

Respectfully disagree. (On home ownership; the gun idea's not bad.)

 

There are studies that indicate a link between home ownership and local political activism. They link isn't proven causal (last I looked), but it would make sense: one tends to feel more invested when they're actually tied to the area contractually (via a mortgage and a physical investment).

 

Prolly not. But owning two acres up in the hills 15 minutes from my town and 20 minutes from a town big enough to have a state university certainly would.

Usually when folks start trying to focus on the rediculous extremes of a situation to try and discredit it, its because they have a bias to that situation. FTR, I did clarify in the OP that Im not talking about ALL federal land. So whats your bias here? Why don't you tell me what problem you really have with this idea?

 

The problem with renting is that its always going to cost as much as people can afford to pay, because landlords are looking to maximize their investment. Which isn't wrong. But the cost of housing on average is 1000% higher now, relative to average income, than it was 50 years ago, despite substantially lower costs of building houses. Raising the income will only cause rents to raise as well, and given that housing is usually the largest part of peoples budget, raising income never actually gets them more money, its gets their landlords more money to buy more properties to rent. This is never going to get better unless we increase the supply of available land that people can own themselves. I for one would rather see that land owned by the folks that live on it instead of by companies or the govt who are going to use peoples need for housing as a way to financially control them.

In short, home ownership is conducive to independence and self determination, and people need more of those.

 

Lots of renters groups wielding what little power they can in our massively corrupt system.

 

So government this and government that.....how about we gut the government to a bare minimum?

 

Im not sure what you're requesting. Can you rephrase or clarify?

 

Let's make a deal, I'll give back my two acres of land for one acre of beachfront in San Diego.

 

1) If you're not talking about ALL federal land then you don't have enough to give every American two acres.
2) I don't believe home ownership should be that big a priority. In fact I believe that it might be a major impediment to labor mobility which keeps Americans from changing jobs and locations to better themselves (and the country) economically

 

Ownership of raw land? I'm not seeing a great advantage there.

And who decides who gets what where & why?

Affordable housing needs to be the focus, not the abstract notion of value in owning raw land somewhere.

 

I would rather see affordable housing built. (But some good points.)