ISTM The issue LC is missing is that land today is not valued the way land was 100 years ago.
In the frontier and homesteading eras of Canada and the US the critical measures of merit (not cost or price; merit) was whether the land was farmable and to a much lesser degree whether it had acceptable connections to the existing or soon-to-be delivered transportation. Adequate soil, adequate water, long enough growing season was primary with proximity to navigable rivers, existing wagon trails, etc. a distant 15th on the list of factors to evaluate.
In the modern world the main things that determine merit (again not cost or price; merit) is proximity to existing urban centers and to a much lesser degree flatness. You can build suburbia or light industry on much hillier ground than you can subsistence farm with a mule or primitive tractor.
The idea of “the government” plunking down a fresh crossroads in central Alabama or central Manitoba and expecting thereby to seed another Altanta or Calgary is ludicrous. All the free land in the world won’t offset the incremental cost to install all the infrastructure of a modern city. And by “infrastructure” I don’t just mean power & running water & phones & roads.
The true infrastructure of a city is all the stuff in the Yellow pages. All those businesses making & selling all that stuff. All those people working for wages. And all those people buying the stuff all the other folks are producing. THAT is the value-add of Toronto or Atlanta over Bumfuck MB or AL.
There certainly have been examples of artificial cities created in Nowheresville by government fiat. Canberra Australia and Brasilia Brazil come to mind. In both cases the government, for completely non-economic reasons, decided to create a city in the wilderness. They then subsidized tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people living and working there until the natural commercial infrastructure filled in around the government one. 20-30 years later there was a little commercial. 50-75 years later there was more. Even today at this late date, if those goverments chose to move to a new town, or to a new wilderness, they’d instantly impoverish those cities & create a fresh Detroit over the next 10 years.
My bottom line: The world has changed since the 1800s. Wishing for new big cities in the prairie is silly. It’s as anachronistic as the current thread pining for transcontinental passenger zeppelin service.
The future is the current cities expanding ever outward and to some degree upward when terrain makes “up” cheaper than “out.”
Notice I haven’t said anything about price. Yet.
When most of a land parcel’s *merit *is its proximity to the rest of civilization, what do you suppose that causes for prices? Price will be an inverse exponential of distance from major downtowns. Something 10x farther away will be worth 1/100th the price.
Releasing all the government land 500 miles from a major city will have zero effect on the prices at 40, 50, 100, and 150 miles from that city. Because the price vs. distance decay function is exponential, not linear.
If indeed there is significant buildable government land 5 or 10 or 20 miles from the current suburban frontier, releasing *that *land *would *have an immediate effect on local prices.
Funny enough there is such a city here in North America. Las Vegas in Nevada. It’s an island of privately owned land surrounded on all sides by government land. Between the 1970s and 2008 the conurbation has expanded almost entirely to the borders of available land. Once the place finishes digging out from the 2008 recession we’ll see how much their inability to grow out will result in either price spikes, building up, or economic stagnation.
It is extremely harsh in every conceivable way.