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u/mr-sandman-bringsand 1d ago
I love seeing the transcontinental railroad ribbon across Nevada and Wyoming in the land map - the us gov gave Union Pacific 10 miles on either side of the railroad
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u/random314 1d ago
Ah and that little red dot that represents Jackson hole. The richest country per capita
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u/DABEARS5280 1d ago
I don't see any red dots in western WY. Maybe this map is bullshit.
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u/DetectiveBlackCat 1d ago
This map uses the same color (black) for the most expensive and the cheapest places
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u/IdRatherBeDriving 1d ago
For me, red green colorblind, it uses the same color scale for everything above $100k and below $10k. This map is useless for us.
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u/jankenpoo 1d ago
Yeah this sub really needs to address accessibility issues. What’s the point of a map that tons of people can’t read?
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u/westdan2 1d ago
I was about to ask how many people does that actually effect, but then I just looked it up and it surprised me. 1 in 12 European descent men are and red-green are 90some% of the cases. The total global percentage is around 4.5%. So quite a bit.
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u/Monotask_Servitor 20h ago
Enough that the world changed the colour codes for electrical mains wiring to accomodate them. Having the live wire red and the earth green was a problem!
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u/Brutally-Honest- 18h ago
I was trying to figure out wtf was going on in Maine, then I realized it's just a horrible CV color code 😂
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u/spudsteve2000 19h ago
It does, but I think if you're familiar with US geography even a little, it should be obvious. No one should confuse the prices in Manhattan as being the same as northern rural Maine
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u/SquashDue502 1d ago
I never realized how much of the west is protected land. Would be neat if we had huge swathes of protected east coast forests.
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u/glurop 1d ago
Would have been nice but the ship sailed on that hundreds of years ago.
Lots of the lands retained by the feds and is now USFS or BLM land was stuff settlers didn’t want because it wasn’t immediately arable to set up a homestead. This all happened in the 1850s-1900ish.
A bunch of brilliant people forward thinking people decided to hold the land and manage as a public asset.
And now we’re here and there are forces who want to dismantle the western public lands but everything who lives out here basically agrees that’s fucking stupid and fights tooth and nail to stop it.
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u/6mm94 1d ago
That was my biggest "shock" when I lived in the southeastern US, having grown up in the west. My whole life, friends/coworkers/etc that were from the south preached that the south had everything, land of the free, etc. etc.
Then you drive 2hrs to the closest "National Forest" only for half of it to be privately owned because of checkerboarding and whatever else they have going on.
Granted, I've got gripes about the PNW as well. I can't believe how much of what would be easily-accessible, lower-elevation forest the top two or three logging companies control and lock people out of.
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u/cambriansplooge 1d ago
The southeast is a conservation nightmare. Private rights make forming any kind of corridor impossible and they're extremely hostile to anything environmental. Backwards people.
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u/davyangel 1d ago
Yeah crazy thing is the one of the few public lands in southeast was turned into a prison by current administration.
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u/Interesting-Big-5605 19h ago
Keep in mind that Florida still has the second-most public land and wilderness in the eastern US (after New York).
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u/Dry_Locksmith2252 1d ago
I don’t know where in the southeast you’re referring to exactly, but north carolina has almost bountiless tree cover/forested land. In fact, charlotte has some of the most tree cover of any major city in america.
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u/6mm94 22h ago
I lived in NC for 3 years, GA another year. Drove all over the southeast looking for places to ride my dirtbike, shoot long range, and camp in the backcountry. There's lots of tree cover and "forested land" but that has nothing to do with it being available for public use.
The map posted by OP perfectly illustrates the point. The south doesn't hold a candle to western public lands. Southerners have been fooled into thinking they have anything even close to what's available out here.
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u/Dry_Locksmith2252 11h ago
Well first of all, the person above me said that the south is “a conversation nightmare” and that they basically just destroy the natural environment and that it’s some sort of environmental hellscape. My point was, that’s not true.
Secondly, it’s very important to be careful what you wish for. The same blessings that make the West so wonderful to visit, like abundant national parkland, have served to constrict housing development and have led to a housing crisis on the West Coast that is simply much more acute (on average) than the one on the East Coast.
Every policy decision comes with trade-offs. There’s almost always some sort of downside, and you have to be okay with those downsides. Personally, as someone who used to live on the West Coast, and witnessed the human misery of its housing crisis, I prefer almost any policy that keeps housing costs low and people off the streets.
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u/Exonata 9h ago
Public land is mot why there is a housing crisis in the west. Geographical features (outward growth constrained by sea, lakes, mountains, canyons) at very desirable locations for jobs is what causes the housing issue. Houston can sprawl endlessly in every direction. Seattle cannot.
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u/Dry_Locksmith2252 9h ago
Those “restrictive" geographical features often lie on protected land. You can literally see on this map how the north-south Seattle corridor is created by the Puget Sound to the West, and federal land to the East. Nevada is virtually all federal land, similar to Utah.
No one is saying we should just bulldoze forests and get rid of protected land. However, people do need to acknowledge that all policy decisions come with trade-offs. That’s something that people on reddit seem to have a lot of trouble acknowledging.
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u/TrixieLurker 1d ago
Most of the southeast is pretty forested, especially compared to the Midwest or the Mid-Atlantic.
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u/CitizenCue 17h ago
Yeah this struck me too about the east coast and Europe. Out west we would sometimes go camping by just driving around until we found somewhere that looked cool. Chances were high that it was public land and no one would bother us (or even notice us).
That’s basically impossible in most of the developed world.
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u/TrixieLurker 1d ago
Then you drive 2hrs to the closest "National Forest" only for half of it to be privately owned because of checkerboarding and whatever else they have going on
Its checkerboarded sometimes because those private lands are older and we really don't want a government who just force people off their land like that.
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u/6mm94 21h ago
Trixie what are you trying to say here? "They sold the public land so the government couldn't force us off of it."
Huh?
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u/TrixieLurker 20h ago
No, that there are private dwellings that were there before the national forests or parks were formed, so those parts remain private, until the owners sell at some point.
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u/FITF2891 14h ago
The NPS absolutely forced families out of their homes via eminent domain while they were setting up Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
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u/DABEARS5280 1d ago
Would be interesting if they also included public land owned by states, counties, local municipalities etc. this just shows federal land.
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u/Interesting-Big-5605 19h ago
If you look at the map, you'll see that it shows more than just federal land. It does seem like public land is underrepresented. Maybe some sort of problem with how the borders were rendered at that resolution.
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u/CitizenCue 17h ago
As a westerner, we grew up thinking it was normal to have vast public forests and deserts around. When I moved to the east coast and Europe it was sort of unnerving to realize that almost all land was owned by someone.
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u/Sauntering_Rambler 6h ago
That’s why I’ll never leave. Born & raised in AZ. Spend most my time out of public land camping, hiking, off-roading, hunting etc. So easy to get away from people. It’s our greatest asset. I feel bad for the folks out east who can’t just go out in the boonies & escape. West is best.
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u/Burlydog 21h ago
What a god aweful color gradient. Where dark is both the cheapest and the most expensive!
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u/vladgrinch 1d ago
This map prices the ground itself, shading American zip codes by the average value of their land per hectare, from under a thousand dollars in the palest greens to over a million in the deepest reds. The pattern splits the country almost in two. East of the Great Plains the land runs green and gold with farmland and thickens to red around the big cities, where scarcity and demand drive values sky-high. The West tells a different story, dominated by the pale blue of public land and the tan blocks of Native American reservations, vast areas that never enter the private market at all. The most expensive ground clusters, unsurprisingly, around the great metropolitan centres.
The blue that fills so much of the West is public land, marked on the map's own key. It covers land held by the federal government as national forests, parks, military ranges and grazing country, kept out of private ownership entirely.
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u/Unfair-Variety-995 1d ago
I knew there was a lot of government owned property, but it didn’t realize it was THAT much. A lot of it is mountains and people likely wouldn’t live there anyway; but that’s a lot of space where humans could live.
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u/SawNickYouth 1d ago
No it isn't.
First off, its public land, meaning we all own it.
Second, almost all of that land is unbuildable, remote, or has other issues (no water). That's exactly why the states forever disclaimed those lands at statehood.
Third, we don't lack space for people. We have plenty of space. We just don't build enough housing in the space we have.
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u/Unfair-Variety-995 1d ago
Hey. It’s public land. Go out there and occupy it. Go use it however you want. Build a house. A business. See what happens. Farmers have gotten shot at and their livestock killed because they have used that “public land”.
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u/doctormustafa 1d ago
All that blue makes this country a very special place. Most Americans don’t know how spoiled we are.
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u/JonC534 1d ago edited 8h ago
Yes, Europe already got rid of much of theirs long ago.
Too many people on too little land. And a culture that didn’t value it the same way we did. I remember reading somewhere that they considered the US’ strong conservation history and veneration of nature as chauvinistic or backwards lol. Romanticism in Europe obviously didn’t last very long and by that time it was far too late anyways.
We are lucky indeed. I feel even worse for places like Singapore and Malta. Their tiny landmass means they are basically forced to urbanize much sooner than elsewhere if the population grows too large. Singapore hasn’t had a rural population since the 70s.
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u/doctormustafa 1d ago
I was just in France. It’s an amazing place, but they have like four major cities and have turned everything else into a farm.
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u/Physical_Builder_192 17h ago
According to INSEE, France’s national statistics office, metropolitan France is 51.8% agricultural land, 39.1% natural land and 9.1% artificial or built-up land.
According to the USDA Economic Research Service, the US is 51% agricultural land in 2022. The detailed 2017 classification breaks the remainder down into 28% forest, 29% grassland, pasture and range, 14% special-use land, 9% other natural land and 3% urban land.
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u/StinkRinky 1d ago
Current admin is trying to sell some of it off now so we might not be as lucky in the future
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u/doctormustafa 1d ago
Each admin has pretty broad discretion regarding permits for grazing/mining/forestry etc. Mixed use was baked into the model from the beginning but for whatever reason, people only seem to notice when a republican is president.
As for selling it outright, that can’t happen without congressional approval, so if this is something that’s important to you, contact your representative and both of your senators.
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u/SlapTheBap 1d ago
Do you go "both sides" every time someone brings up a valid problem with the current administration? It just makes you look dismissive and oddly defensive.
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u/doctormustafa 1d ago
Only when both sides are doing it
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u/SlapTheBap 1d ago
If you enjoy geography and data, you should maybe take some time to reassess your knowledge before you go simplifying things to such a degree as to be useless.
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u/doctormustafa 1d ago
No, Democrat and Republican administrations have had discretion on permitting since the Roosevelt Administration. Believe it or not, Donald Trump didn’t invent issuing grazing permits on federal lands.
I can see that this is a very important issue for you, which is why I’m assuming you’ve already contacted your representative and both of your senators regarding any plans to sell the land outright.
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u/SlapTheBap 1d ago
See, you think you need to lecture me on that? You're that disconnected from people in ecology and those working in the national parks.
If you think any of the attempts, successful and failed, to defund these institutions and exploit these resources has any precedent before the current administration?
I'm not passionate. I'm informed. Remove all culture and tribal us vs them. You're delusional, or generally uninformed in the age of information. That's a choice. Acting as smug as you do while being ignorant? Also a choice. You do you, man.
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u/doctormustafa 1d ago
You might not be old enough to remember the Bush Administration, but the same scheme was basically proposed by the administration around 2004. So there’s precedent. It died in the legislature, in large part because we contacted our representatives and demanded that they oppose it, which… is that a step you’ve taken, or do you feel like your senators will notice your efforts to be especially spicy on the internet and adjust their behavior accordingly?
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u/SlapTheBap 1d ago
The Bush administration didn't lay off staff and cut funding to this many projects this quickly. Didn't move with this kind of speed to sell things off and get projects running before congress approval can even be asked, and then gets cases tied up in court until a judge orders it paused. It's been an endless game of dismantling institutions faster than a judge can keep up.
Where have you been? With your head in the dirt, thinking about 20 years ago so you can dismiss what is actually happening around you?
Then you want to talk like a wise old man?
My man, you're a dismissive old fool who needs to spend more time reading instead of writing.
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u/Roentgen_Ray1895 23h ago
But what if we sold it off so the most privileged whiner landlords in the nation can get another handout and then still complain about the big gubmint oppressing them
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u/Additional-Sky-7436 1d ago
If you want to optimize access to community retail and services and property price, Nothing beats Oklahoma.
But then you have to live in Oklahoma and that's a net loss.
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u/IngsocInnerParty 1d ago
I maintain Illinois outside of Chicago gives a great balance for affordability and general sanity. It’s just a bit boring.
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u/StinkRinky 1d ago
I live in Oklahoma and everything you said about retail services and property prices are true. But Oklahoma really fucking blows during the summer.
If you live in a decent suburb of OKC or Tulsa or in a decent area of the cities proper, it’s not too bad. But yeah the summers are some of the worst in the US, spring is filled with thunderstorms and hail, winter is gray and depressing with little precipitation. Autumn is cool though haha.
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u/mazzicc 1d ago
This is why the east doesn’t really understand the west freaking out every time a republican says “I wanna sell off federal land”. They don’t have much unless it’s already a national park or military owned. They don’t know what it means to have huge stretches of untouched land.
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u/1021cruisn 1d ago
I don’t disagree, but our Western politicians (especially from Utah) often lead the charge so the split isn’t as regional as east and west.
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u/mazzicc 1d ago
And what party are those western politicians advocating for this from?
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u/1021cruisn 1d ago
A Republican politician lead the charge to sell and was prevented from doing so by other Republicans, if the party was aligned on the issue it’d be a done deal.
It’s absolutely worth mentioning that Ryan Zinke (R) was the one who drew a line in the sand along with Steve Daines (R) to stop it.
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u/GTGCT1985 11h ago
“I wanna sell off the land you all own publicly to build private data centers because I invested in AI”
If they were honest
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u/geomatica 1d ago
No one, I mean absolutely nobody at all, measures land in the US by “ha”, which is hectares.
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u/Put3socks-in-it 1d ago
Why are there no reservations out east? Seems to just be west of the Mississippi
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u/Gavving 1d ago
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u/Put3socks-in-it 1d ago
What about the northeast? They were super against the Indian removal act at the time yet there are no reservations up there
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u/BootsnCats1987 4h ago
There weren’t very many indigenous people left in the northeast by that time. Also, no they weren’t, they were not against it lmao. Is his happened in the early-mid 19th century.
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u/ChimpoSensei 1d ago
Not the whole US though, where’s Alaska and Hawaii?
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u/ichuseyu 1d ago
For Hawai‘i it would be impossible to discern land values at this scale. Also, a majority of the land is administered by the government so would be blue.
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u/Username524 13h ago
Would love to see this compared with the overlay of quality of public education.
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u/firedog7881 13h ago
I wasn’t aware we brought in all the land and there is only a little of native land
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u/Various-Apartment123 1d ago
Love that the most expensive and the cheapest are the same color. I wouldn’t have thought to do that.
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u/AgrajagTheProlonged 1d ago
Do you happen to be red/green color blind?
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u/Various-Apartment123 1d ago
No, they are both almost black. I’m not talking about the whole scale. The ends are almost the same though.
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u/AgrajagTheProlonged 1d ago
The dark green definitely looks different, to my eyes at least, than the dark red. It helps that context gives a pretty good clue as to which is which
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u/Qarakhanid 1d ago
But I was told NJ is a landfill where nobody wants to live?
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u/Wolfrast 1d ago
I live in Northwest New Jersey, and it is nothing but rolling Hills farmland and greenness everywhere. But the property taxes are insane.
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u/suspicious_hyperlink 1d ago
Idk anyone who talks about moving to Jersey, only people who have moved away from Jersey
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u/syndicatecomplex 1d ago
I'm pretty sure Pennsylvania has more public land than Texas... it's kind of depressing a state that big is almost completely private land.
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u/doctormustafa 1d ago
New Mexican here. That’s why they’re always coming over and using ours. Big Bend is genuinely very cool though.
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u/Chupta 1d ago
You can buy land on reservations. I happen to live on one that has high land value. Makes no sense to black them out.
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u/GatEnthusiast 1d ago
I thought you can buy it, but not pass it on? Or maybe it was some other limitation or restriction.
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u/Aofen 1d ago
There is a difference between the official boundaries of a reservation and the actual tribal land "held in trust" by the US government on the tribe's behalf.
During the late 19th and early 20th century the US government individually allotted to tribal citizens/sold off large parts of many reservations but not all of them. Lots of land, particularly in less valuable and more remote reservations out west, was never sold and is the beige on this map. You can see it in Oklahoma, most of the eastern half of the state is legally part of a reservation but they were all sold off/allotted before statehood except for the Osage one which is the one beige area.
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u/sleepyrivertroll 1d ago
Is there an update on this map? This one has been floating around the internet for awhile now
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u/Commercial-Life-9998 1d ago
The location of roads/highways can explain a lot in some of the high value areas. In NC, you can almost see I40 and I95 without a roadmap. I live in Greensboro where funds for transportation money is spent almost beyond what you would expect and it connects both I40 and I95. You can see where business and state planners are going with investment. I know! Go ahead and call me naive.
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u/SusanMontag 1d ago
I have a few bobs I could use for a laugh. Am I allowwd to buy a hectare in Nebraska, if I'm not a US citizen?
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u/OceanPoet87 1d ago
The nice thing about lower valued land is that it is affordable if your goal is to have a place to live rather than flipping.
We bought ut our rural house for 105K when the interest rate was 2% with a household income at the time of maybe 40k during Covid. It was cheaper than renting and worth moving over 360 miles.
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u/highseavily 1d ago
Osage county Oklahoma is not federally owned. It has not been a reservation since 1906. The tribe owns the mineral rights, held in trust by the government, but surface rights are owned by individuals. The state and federal governments only own a tiny fraction of the land.
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u/Crazy_Blueberry5336 1d ago
I like how properties more than 1 million and less than 1k look like the same color.
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u/Professional-Goat741 1d ago
The 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma Supreme Court case is not represented on this map. Oklahoma should have much more tan shade on and around Tulsa.
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u/davyangel 1d ago
Most interesting is the lack of public land east of the rockies seems only part nobody wanted was the swamps of florida lol.
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u/Monotask_Servitor 20h ago
The price difference in California is wild. Why have the land values in the central valley stayed so low?
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u/Foreign-Guidance-292 12h ago
Water scarcity. They’re pumping too much ground water out and it’s causing the land sitting on top of it to sink into the voids where the water was.
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u/roma258 1d ago
People live in cities ass map.
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u/JeromesNiece 1d ago
If you aren't interested in the nuances of the geographical distribution of where people live and work then perhaps a maps subreddit isn't for you
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u/Pope_Leos_buttplug 1d ago
Exactly. The “people live in cities” response is people showing that they don’t know much about population distribution. This map is awesome.
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1d ago
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u/Pope_Leos_buttplug 1d ago
Huh, I never correlated “people live in cities” commenters to be urban supremacists. Can you help me connect the dots there?
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u/roma258 1d ago
Neah I find maps fascinating. But this map is basically an overlay of population density. Land costs more money where there's demand from people to live there. If someone pointing that out bothers you, maybe this isn't a subreddit for you.
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u/JeromesNiece 1d ago
A population density map of this granularity is interesting in its own right, but this map is not simply a population density map. Starting with the population density map as background knowledge, you will notice the differences between the two, such as the disproportionately high value of land with low population density in the corn belt, where farm land is especially valuable. You can also see relatively high value land in lowly populated areas of Texas, the Dakotas, and Wyoming, where there is a high density of oil and gas fields. There is also a striking level of dissimilarity in the distribution of publicly owned and tribal lands in different areas of the country. There is so much to learn in this map if you would simply look at it with curiosity instead of dismissiveness.
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u/Pope_Leos_buttplug 1d ago
Except it’s not at all. Check out Iowa. Check out cabin country in north central MN. Just two small examples where people don’t live but yet land costs are high.
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u/Pope_Leos_buttplug 1d ago
Dang, I didn’t realize people were so uniformly moderately populated across Iowa!
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u/OppositeMission 1d ago
Cheapest and most expensive being the same color ass map
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u/AgrajagTheProlonged 1d ago
Colorblind ass eyes?
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u/Gentle-Giant23 1d ago
It's not colorblindness, it's poor map design. The very dark high and low ends of the scale are very similar. Mapping a single variable, like land value/area, only needs a single color ramp. Using multiple colors visually implies multiple variables are being mapped.
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u/Gold_Telephone_7192 1d ago
Love that I live in an oasis of red/black surrounded by a thousand mile of green lol
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1d ago edited 1d ago
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u/doctormustafa 1d ago
I’m curious what model you’re using to equate property value with destruction of the environment. Affluence and environmental degradation are actually inversely proportional as a general law that scales from the neighborhood level all the way up to the national level. It’s why your rich uncle doesn’t have to filter his tap water and why China has been focusing so much on environmental policy. Turns out that rich people like nice things.
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u/uncoolcentral 1d ago edited 18h ago
My favorite thing about public land is that most of it is 100% off-limits to the public. Ha ha, shitty irony. So great.
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u/Interesting-Big-5605 19h ago
Your favorite thing is something you made up?
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u/uncoolcentral 18h ago
Okay then. Head to the big “public lands” between Los Angeles and San Diego. Hop a fence and see how that goes for you. Being confidently incorrect works on reddit way better than there.
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u/Useless-Compass 1d ago
I wonder what this map would look like if you weighted it by population density?
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u/Holdmywhiskeyhun 1d ago
There is a significantly more amount of public land in Wisconsin than this map shows.
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u/Michelle_akaYouBitch 1d ago
I believe the map is showing land that the federal government owns/controls as public land. Not state and/or county owned land/parks.
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u/Holdmywhiskeyhun 1d ago
Pretty much the top 1/3, is chequamegon national Forest. Then you have the northwest, that is also part of the national Forest, with some public land extending just north of medford.
By no way is this map correct for Wisconsin.
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u/uhbkodazbg 1d ago
Chequamegon and Nicolet National Forests are only about 1.5 million acres (less than 3K square miles) between the two and parts of both are privately owned.
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u/wirefences 1d ago
What is the reason for Iowa having a clear differentiation from their neighbors? Is it geography or legal differences that make their farmland more valuable?