Also, how does/did one claim unowned land?
In the state of New South Wales, Australia, if you occupy land for a period (I think it’s twenty years), and pay all rates and other costs, it becomes yours.
I think all land is owned. I even think that new land formed by volcanic processes in Hawaii is owned by someone as soon as it’s cooled (or even before).
Generally, people homesteaded unowned land. This could be part of an organized movment of people (the Great Migration as part of Manifest Destiny) or something less regulated (the colonization of Tennessee, say, before it became a state). The idea of someone owning previously unclaimed land because he’s lived on it for a few years and made improvements to it is pretty well ingrained in all systems based on English Common Law, I think.
Being given title to land because one has lived on it for a certain period of time (without the permission of the original landowner) is called adverse possession. In the U.S., at least, the land does not have to be originally ownerless. Title through adverse possession has to be granted in a court proceeding. From what I remember reading about it, however, there seem to be widely differing opinions by courts on what conditions have to be fulfilled. For instance, some say that the person living on the land has to have believed, erroneously, that he did in fact own it. Some say the absentee landowner has to have been aware that there was somebody occupying his land and then have failed to evict them. Others disagree on these points.
As far as the OP, by saying the land in question is “in the US,” you’ve basically answered your own question. If a private party doesn’t have title, the government claims it. This is probably not exactly the same as saying that a government agency “owns” the property in the same way that a private party would, but it does mean that you can’t just build your house on it. There are homesteading laws in the U.S. providing for private persons to claim government lands under certain conditions, but you have to abide by those rules.
There’s a very interesting discussion of the history of “squatting” and other land-related issues in the United States in Hernando DeSoto’s 2000 book The Mystery of Capital. It talks a lot about how government dealt with the problem of having one guy buying or being given a deed to government lands and later finding out that other people had already gone there and claimed it for themselves.
This BLM* site states that homesteading is no longer allowed on any Federal lands, since 1976.
Somehow it’s disappointing. Even though, when I was a kid, they said you could homestead land in Nevada for instance, and water for it could be had less than a mile away (straight down). Still, you could if you wanted to.
*BLM=Federal Bureau of Land Management
There has been (and still is, among certain Western radical groups) considerable controversy about Federal ownership of unallocated lands.
A simple argument is often given: all lands acquired after the orginal 13 colonies were ‘territories of the US’ (i.e the federal government) before being eligible to apply for statehood, so all unclaimed property was property of the Federal government prior to statehood. Essentially all the constitutions of the newly-formed states contain language acknowledging this, and some land was allotted to state ownership by the Federal government at the time of statehood, under the Homestead Act (e.g. the two sections of public land in each township for schools) etc. There were some quirks, like Nevada finagling to trade its widely spaced Homestead Act plots for the 2 million acres which had water available (all of which which it promptly sold to private individuals)
This simple argument was advanced at various times within the government but wasn’t actually the one formally used to establish the legitimacy of the ownership. (which was, IIRC, a rather twisted interpretation of a tangentially aplicable law whose name escapes me - but that’s just my opinion. I’m not lawyer)
The Homestead Act has already been noted, and of course, all levels of government have acquired (i.e.bought over the objections of the owner) lands ‘in the (specific) public interest’ lands for specific purposes under the doctrine of eminent domain.
Basically, there isn’t any basis to say that any land is “unclaimed” by the Feds. Even the Homestead Act was an offer * by the federal government* to grant title to private individuals for parcels of Federally owned land if certain conditions were met. It was never unclaimed - it was owned by the Feds (of course other countries have disputed the ownership of those territories rather bloodily on occassion)
In other words, yes, all lands that are formally in the US (i.e. part of a state or territory) are owned by a person or givernment. This has been the case for well over a century, but for most of that time, the Federal gov’t would offer you title to certain packages of land if you met their terms. They still will - but their terms would probably include paying for it, instead of merely settling it, and they are rather pickier about which “certain packages” are available.
Heh. Mr. Freud, your slip is showing. They may givernment, but first they takernment away.
“Why” is it dissapointing? (Curious)
The Homestead Act (s) and high levels of immigration had a purpose over a hundred years ago : we had lots of empty land and not many people here, we needed foreign labor, and we needed more people to fill up our very empty towns, empty jobs, empty land, and empty highways.
Now that we have 300 million people, and getting another additional 100,000 immigrants each week, why on earth would anyone think that there is any empty/unclaimed land to be had?
This isn’t the United States, but in Mexico: my father-in-law had to pay someone to set up a small muffler shop (a little hovel, really) on his land so the parachaiistas (parachutists, squatters) wouldn’t land on it before he could lease the land to Mega Electrica. It was major money and he says that’s the only way he could protect himself. He’s lost other parcels of land to organized squatters. They have their own syndicate that does this professionally there. Mexico does have land titles and deeds, but they also have people that forge stuff backed by people who’ve been living on the land for “years.” Property’s often not worth the legal expense of recovering. Well, the Mega Electricra was worth protecting.
He’s lost land to the government’s squatting! Seems they built a huge shipping port on his land (it wasn’t all his, but it was swallowed up with others’ land, too). He fought for compensation and was just recently given title to an equal quantity of land that’s virtually worthless (for now).
There are also survey errors that create “gores” and “no man’s lands” between parcels that are usually outside platted subdivisions. (A legal description would include metes and bounds, rather than lot/phase/subdivision.)
As a planner, I encountered slivers of no man’s land from time to time. If the parcels are unplatted, the property boundary lines were adjusted to eliminate the no man’s land, and revised legal descriptions (quitclaim deeds) were submitted to the couty property recorder’s office.
In a small Florida town where I worked, there is a two or three acre metes and bounds parcel that nobody owns … literally. It used to be a cemetery, but the non-affiliated church that owned the property disbanded abour 100 years ago. There was no cemetery association, and today the lot is weed strewn and unmaintained. The local and state government have made no attempt to acquire the land by eminent domain.
Yeah, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming (etc) are bursting at the seams. Keep them forners out!
If it’s called a different name and refers to a different process, do you ever think it might be a different thing?
Homesteading is different from adverse possession. Homesteading involves creating a chain of claims to the land by having someone live on it long enough to establish a valid claim to it. Adverse possession involves restoring a chain of claims to the land by finding land that has fallen dormant (the chain has broken) and having someone live on it long enough to re-create a new chain of claims to it.
Homesteading only makes sense in terms of some frontier, where there’s a nonzero amount of land that has never been owned (by anyone that the people think matter). Adverse possession, however, could theoretically work in a densely populated city. All you need is a parcel of land nobody can lay a valid claim to via historical legitimacy.
To the contrary, in the case of adverse possession, there may very well be someone who “can lay a valid claim” to the property in question. The adverse possessor is basically making an argument along the lines of “the real owner hasn’t done anything to stop me from living here, so it should be declared mine.”
Can you give a cite for the 100,000/week? This site: http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/back1302.html gives the figure at 1.5 million/year – less than a third of that. And I’d hate to think that we were working ourselves into a right wing isolationist snit over inaccurate numbers.
90% of the land in Nevada is owned by the government, with most of it being protected or posted: keep out! There is extremely little land available in Nevada that people would be able to build a home on.
There is little productive private land of any use in Montana or Wyoming that is even for sale and available. Ever try to buy a home in/near Jackson Hole? Except for Las Vegas and Reno, few foreigners are going to these particular 3 states, and none of the productive land in these 3 states is “empty”.
If you are raising cattle on scrub land, it may look like the land is empty, but in reality, you are already using the land to its maximum supportability(i.e. it is full). It takes a lot of acres to support a cow on scrub land.
There is no comparison between now and back in the 1800’s, 1700’s when there was plenty of empty productive land and lots of businesses needing lots of workers and could not hire enough people.
I really dont know why anyone would think we need lots more people living here now, in todays age. Exactly which businesses cant hire enough workers? What highways are too uncongested? Which cities have home prices sinking so low in price at give-away prices because of no demand?
I think you need to go back and read the history of the Homestead acts and see why they were passed in the first place, and why they are not needed anymore.
Susanann, the next time you feel the urge to post something about immigration, please go here.
Thanks for coming by.