A little while ago I read a letter-to-the-editor in a newspaper which proposed - albeit tentatively - selling some sections of highly desirable parkland in London (I think Hyde Park and Regents Park were the places in question) to private sector property developers, in order to raise a bit of money and help pay off the country’s credit card bills.
Leaving aside the (admittedly) controversial idea of selling off public park areas in order to make a bit of cash, might this be at least economically viable? Let’s say the US sold off a few bits and bobs of (say…) Yosemite or Yellowstone - would the profit gained really make any sizable chunk in any debts/deficits?
As an extra question - would the UK/US governments be able to do it, even if they wanted to?
Here in Westwood, Ca, USA we have a hundreds of acres Veterans complex. I would reckon the land itself to be worth at least a billion US dollars. Might be worth selling the land and raking in subsequent taxes the land generates.
First, what’s your definition of economically viable? Yellowstone Park contains 2,221,766 acres. If you sold it for $1000/acre that’s a bit more than $2 billion dollars, about what the U.S. spends every five hours or almost exactly how much the national debt is currently increasing each day. Selling it would put it back on the tax rolls, but the country would also lose all the money the park generates. Hard to say whether that’s a good deal overall, but it does nothing at all for the debt. That stays true if you raise the money by a power of ten. If you say that the park is worth $2 trillion, then that would make a dent - but that’s also more than anybody could afford to pay, so it’s fantasy.
You could argue that any additional money coming in is better than none. Certainly people are calling for Detroit to sell off its assets for pay off its mere $18 billion debt. But the U.S. debt is 1000X greater than Detroit’s. And financially it’s in far better shape.
The best way to reduce the deficit and the debt is to have the economy grow. Which it is doing, albeit more slowly than hoped for. Even so the annual deficit has been roughly halved since FY 2008. Selling irreplaceable assets is a desperate last resort that is not remotely needed in the U.S. as a nation. Should the U.S. sell certain things it is not using? Yes, and in fact things get sold probably every single day. But like most easy answers, this one doesn’t work in the real world.
Yosemite and Yellowstone is not especially valuable property because it’s not near any urban centre. Try selling Central Park in NY instead. It’s been valued at $528 billion.
Thats the extreme example but I’m sure plenty of other US cites have valuable central parks. Selling them is going to be pretty unpopular. Try it and see what happens.
Presumably the $528 billion valuation of Central Park is based on the valuation of land and buildings on nearby blocks. But those properties are worth so much partly because of their proximity to the park. If the park is built on, their value declines, because now it’s just an endless series of urban blocks.
When the Coalition (and the SNP, north of the border) tried to sell the nation’s forests people went apeshit. Apeshit on all fours. And those are in the middle of nowhere, so nothing in London is getting sold. Except the Mint, the Royal Mail, the Met Office and so on.
Selling assets is usually somewhat of a poisoned chalice - you can only get the money once, and future analysts/critics will always complain that the seller could have got a better deal.
I like the approach taken by the NZ government in the 90’s. They sold the national pine forests to a japanese company, but the rights were only to the wood, not to the land, and the rights reverted after a specific period of time (20 years, I think). Also, harvested land had to be replanted. So the Govt got a bunch of money, and get to sell the regenerating forest again sometime about now.
Selling off parkland in London would be a politically suicidal move. Even if the parks were just sold to some private company to be run as parks, there would still be a major outcry, let alone if they were sold to be built on.
Besides which, the main parks in London are not owned by the government. They are owned by the Crown.
They’ll lease out some portions maybe. There’re probably properties they can sell before that: in a commercialized area, prime rating, and fully disposable and alienable.
If the Government wanted to sell it then ways could easily be found. Parliament trumps the Crown in the UK. That the land technically belongs to the Crown would not matter a jot.
The Crown in this instance is the same as the Government. The Queen has some property which she owns in her personal capacity, but public lands held in the name of the Crown are just that - public lands, and therefore under government control.
The wiki article on the parks makes this clear: the parks are managed under the Crown Lands Act 1851, by a public agency, the Royal Parks Agency, which is an executive agency of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
If the Government wished to dispose of the properties, it could do so.
Only a fool would pay current market rates for Central Park land, because as soon as the city sold off Central Park, property values for miles around would crater.
*All *public land is held by the Crown. Are you saying Parliament can’t sell an office block or a few acres of scrubland without Her Majesty’s permission?