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>Doing the math, it's pretty easy to guess that all that midwestern land is probably owned by "rich people", too. Now do that math with land values in Detroit.

>Doing the math, it's pretty easy to guess that all that midwestern land is probably owned by "rich people", too. Now do that math with land values in Detroit. I think its well accepted that land values are generally quite higher on both coasts than the midwest. Agricultural land values are not very useful for estimating the cost of residential land Edit:removed some snark

logfromblammo 11y ago
But there is a lot more agricultural/forestry land out there in America than residential. There are more people living in Cook, DuPage, and Lake counties than the entire rest of the state of Illinois. 53% of the population on 3% the land area. Ted Turner didn't get to own 2M acres of land by buying in Atlanta. Much of that is bison ranches. There are a lot of people out there that own no more than 0.25 acre, which is pledged as security for a mortgage. If you own land outright, free of liens and mortgages, whether rural or urban or in between, you're already way ahead of most people. You may not be actual rich, but "rich" by comparison with your neighbors. Peering under the covers of agribusiness in the U.S. was somewhat enlightening. It would appear that one should not attempt a farming start-up without at least $1M in the bank, and you will only get about an 8% return on it per year, on average. Small farms simply do not make money; you cannot run a small farm as your sole source of income and expect to earn the equivalent of minimum wage. So the natural conclusion I reached from my cursory research is that the vast majority of raw acreage in the U.S. is probably owned by investment trusts, who lease it for farming, mining, ranching, and logging, to people who barely earn a profit, and mostly just immediately spend 70% of everything they earn on expenses. There's a good reason why YCombinator invests in tech start-ups instead of plows and cows.

logfromblammo 11y ago

But there is a lot more agricultural/forestry land out there in America than residential. There are more people living in Cook, DuPage, and Lake counties than the entire rest of the state of Illinois. 53% of the population on 3% the land area. Ted Turner didn't get to own 2M acres of land by buying in Atlanta. Much of that is bison ranches. There are a lot of people out there that own no more than 0.25 acre, which is pledged as security for a mortgage. If you own land outright, free of liens and mortgages, whether rural or urban or in between, you're already way ahead of most people. You may not be actual rich, but "rich" by comparison with your neighbors. Peering under the covers of agribusiness in the U.S. was somewhat enlightening. It would appear that one should not attempt a farming start-up without at least $1M in the bank, and you will only get about an 8% return on it per year, on average. Small farms simply do not make money; you cannot run a small farm as your sole source of income and expect to earn the equivalent of minimum wage. So the natural conclusion I reached from my cursory research is that the vast majority of raw acreage in the U.S. is probably owned by investment trusts, who lease it for farming, mining, ranching, and logging, to people who barely earn a profit, and mostly just immediately spend 70% of everything they earn on expenses. There's a good reason why YCombinator invests in tech start-ups instead of plows and cows.