9 ms·

This sort of thing happens in the US, too, at least in the Northeast corner of it. The land that my house sits on is owned by the Unitarian Universalist church

This sort of thing happens in the US, too, at least in the Northeast corner of it. The land that my house sits on is owned by the Unitarian Universalist church down the street, and each year I owe them $4 or the equivalent in livestock or firewood. To date I've always found it easiest to mail them a check but someday if I'm feeling grumpy maybe I'll give them a duckling.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
How did you come to own a house that's built on land you don't own? And aren't you worried about what may happen in the future?
- awqrre 10y ago
  Nobody really owns the land their house is built on in the USA... stop paying your property taxes (rent) and you'll see who owns it.
  - znpy 10y ago
    I was waiting for someone to point this out. Have my upvote.
  - pklausler 10y ago
    It's you, and you're in arrears on a tax obligation. Did I get it right?
    - awqrre 10y ago
      I don't owe any taxes, but finding the ones that do is a good way to find cheap properties...
  - GavinMcG 10y ago
    This is such a tired claim. Every civilization ever has been built under the aegis of, if no one else, each other. Of course you own it. The question is what "ownership" means. Ownership of a property is best defined by delineating the specific rights that you can exercise with respect to it. You may bar people from entering it. You might not be able to bar the government from entering it or making certain uses of it. There's a good chance you can't keep people from being underneath your house and extracting valuable minerals, if they're far enough down. Your rights don't extend very far above the earth. But you knew all that when you made the purchase.
    - markdown 10y ago
      > There's a good chance you can't keep people from being underneath your house and extracting valuable minerals 6ft in my (Commonwealth) country. Have always found it cool that ordinary Americans operate their own oil wells on their (sometimes small) properties.
    - awqrre 10y ago
      > But you knew all that when you made the purchase. and you didn't have any other options.
      - GavinMcG 10y ago
        There's this underlying assumption that people seem to have that they have an absolute right to have absolute control over some piece of land. I'm really confused where that comes from. Was it that way in the past? I suppose, in various places and eras. But far more common was that you had enough power to deter the powerful around you, and you were for all intents and purposes a state. I can understand wanting to be a state, but you don't have a right to be one.
  - chrisbennet 10y ago
    I suppose you can think of that way. But consider that the reason you are able to "own" any property is because there is a legal system in place(1). In someplace without an operating rule of law, a warlord could easily take "your" property. Even if you're a King, if you stop paying your knights/army you probably won't hold on to your lands for much longer. Would you say (A) the army "owns" the king's land or (B) the army just makes it possible for him to continue owning it? (1) Unless you are a Law unto yourself i.e. have your own army.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      It's not just a way of thinking about it - it's the actual legal arrangement. In pretty much every state today, you don't own any land (unless you're a monarch, or a noble with an ancient allodial title) - you own an estate in land, but the government (or the monarch in person) owns the actual land.
      - Torgo 10y ago
        you used to be able to get a thing called an allodial title, but it's basically extinct now.
  - jpt4 10y ago
    Primary versus secondary property, sovereign and allodial versus infeudinated ownership. Different in autonomous kind due to a difference in degree of autarky.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - dugmartin 10y ago
    You are right - I ran across this a few years ago which surprised me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_simple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_simple We all must pay service to our feudal lords.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      It's not necessarily a bad thing - it's how you take a legacy system and adapt it to the new conditions without too much breakage. By making the government, in effect, the one and only feudal lord in its jurisdiction, and every land owner its vassal, the existing laws and precedent retain meaning, so you don't have to start from scratch - just change the things that need fixing.
  - tehwalrus 10y ago
    The land, the land, 'twas God who made the land, The land, the land, The ground on which we stand, Why should we be beggars With the ballot in our hand? God gave the land to the people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_(song) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_(song)
- throwawayReply 10y ago
  It's quite common (in the UK) to have properties that haev a leasehold but not freehold. Generally speaking leases are cheap and long (100 years?) and get renewed decades before the lease term ends. It does reduce the property value a little.
  - MrUnderhill 10y ago
    Quite common here in Norway as well, especially for cabins and holiday homes. Interestingly, as recently as 2012, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that landowners were allowed to change the terms of land leases when they came up for renewal, overruling the national supreme court [1]. Before that, they were obliged to offer the exact same terms, adjusted only for inflation. [1] http://www.newsinenglish.no/2012/06/13/lease-holders-now-on-shaky-ground/ http://www.newsinenglish.no/2012/06/13/lease-holders-now-on-...
    - Someone 10y ago
      On a hundred year bond, "adjusted for inflation" can already be a nasty surprise (5% inflation a year over a century gives you about a 2^7 multiplication factor, or two zeroes)
      - smallnamespace 10y ago
        Why would that be a nasty surprise? The real value is unchanged. Unless you're saying the adjustment only happens at renewal, and not annually?
        akvadrako 10y ago
        Often that's the case and in some countries you typically owe the whole value for the next 40 years when it's renewed. Of course it could be absorbed in the mortgage.
  - tzs 10y ago
    It happens here in the US in Washington, too, with houses on Indian reservations owned by people who are not part of the tribe. They have long leases (around 100 years) on the land, and own the house on top of the land. The terms of the leases typically require that the lessee return the land to its original condition when the lease expires, which means demolishing or moving the house and replanting appropriate vegetation, but I've read that usually the tribe will accept the lessee leaving and turning the house over to the tribe. If you are ever buying a house in Washington and see something that seems too good to be true, like a beachfront house at a low price, look carefully for something about a land lease. The practice of leasing land from tribes and building houses on it goes back a long way, and some of the early leases are expiring in a few years.
- fludlight 10y ago
  This is not uncommon. In China, the government owns all of the land and grants long-term leases to people. It happens stateside, too. For example, all of the land in Irvine, California is (was?) owned by the Irvine Company and the people living on it own the structures but lease the land.
  - btilly 10y ago
    Very much is. As well as a lot of other cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company says that the company owns about 1/5 of Orange County. Including several cities. One of those cities is Anaheim, so that suggests that Disney is leasing the land for Disneyland from the Irvine Company!
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Curiously, many cities are organised as corporations, though I'm not entirely sure of the specifics of this. I don't believe most lay claim to the land within their boundaries.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        Historically, residents/property owners have often chosen to form a municipal corporation which basically creates a layer of government. In the case of the Irvine Company, it's the descendant of the Irvine Ranch which never sold off most of its land holdings.
        dredmorbius 10y ago
        The story of the development of the Los Angeles basin is an interesting one that I've been going through over the past few days. "Why does Los Angeles even exist?" being one question. "Why did it out-grow San Francisco?" being another. The 1906 quake and topography likely had a lot to do with it. Just at the time the Westward migration really started in earnest, San Francisco burnt down, and LA didn't have to build any bridges to get between places. Mix up some oil and water for added fun.
- wil421 10y ago
  Certain lakes around where I live are owned by the Army Corp of Engineers. You can get a 100 year lease on the land you want and it's usually renewed with out hassle. I'm sure there are exceptions.
  - alaxsxaq 10y ago
    Along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, there are hundreds of cabins, some now turned into year-round homes, that are on land leased in the early 1900's. In recent years, a number of issues have arisen to change the lease requirements and renewal terms. At least 100 of these properties are on land that has been given to conservation groups by the power company and those leases are not being renewed and the cabins are, slowly due to court battles, being razed.
    - wil421 10y ago
      When the dams were built they forced a few towns to relocate since they would be underwater. It's only relative. Where were the leaseholders when the decision was made to give the land away? Was it Army Corp land or Power company land?
- x91982 10y ago
  The real question (in Europe at least) is why the church and "nobility" are allowed to keep their land that has often been obtained by dubious means.
  - vkou 10y ago
    Almost all land in America that's not owned by the indigenous population has been obtained by dubious means. Generally, might makes right.
  - vkou 10y ago
    Much of the land in America that's not owned by the indigenous population has been obtained by dubious means. Generally, might makes right.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Many of whom obtained it by dubious means from different tribes of indigenous peoples.
  - Veen 10y ago
    If you look back far enough, a huge amount of the land we live on was obtained by violence, theft, or deception. If the first person in the chain of ownership got it by dubious means, they had no right to sell it, and nor did the next person, and so on. By convention, we don't look that far back and ask people to prove their right to ownership. Further back than time immemorial[1] and it's just accepted without further justification. As for royalty and the church, the United Kingdom is not a republic: it's a constitutional monarchy with an established church (the church is part of the state and the monarch is head of the church). There may come a time when the church is disestablished (against the wishes of the antidisestablishmentarians — never thought I'd have a chance to use that word on Hacker News) and the monarchy abolished, but for the moment that's what we have and there's no real justification for "removing" the property of either. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_immemorial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_immemorial
    - arethuza 10y ago
- stonogo 10y ago
  It's common in the US, and institutionalized to the point that the homeowner is in no danger of the 'landlord' revoking the lease. It is frequently historical and in such cases most states require by law the landholder to 'sell' the land to the homeowner on request, usually for a trifling sum. The term for this in the mid-Atlantic is "ground rent," if you want to look for more info.
- arethuza 10y ago
  I don't know about the rest of the UK but here in Scotland if you build property on someone else's land the property belongs to them (NB I've never seen a leasehold in Scotland but feudalism was only officially abolished a few years back!).
  - gozur88 10y ago
    It makes some sense from a practical standpoint. It would get pretty sticky if your tenant built a house and then demanded you stay away from it even after the rental agreement lapsed.
  - thiviost 10y ago
    In Germany, too. A house and the land on which it stands do not form distinct properties but only one, the reasoning is they are physically connected and the house cannot be separated from the land while still being used as a house. The GDR had in the years of its existence softened this doctrine due to its ideological despice for property in general and their conception of public property (sort of modern fief: delegation of usage rights) in particular. Under this conception it was possible to have separate ownership in buildings. This was more or less a incentive and financing game: let the populace build the buildings out of their own savings, and as long we have not abolished property altogether, they might as well own the buildings. However the land registration (Grundbuch) normally includes the buildings. This was however handled differently for different types of buildings. Apartment houses were more properly documented, smaller buildings (holiday homes, garages) nearly never. This was a big problem after reunification, because buying a realty, one could not be sure if there remained rights from third parties to the buildings on the realty. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkseigentum#Sachenrechtsbereinigung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkseigentum#Sachenrechtsbere...
- int_19h 10y ago
  There's also such a thing as "mineral rights", which is separate from land ownership. Hereabouts (Western WA), a lot of land that is built up used to be logged, and the companies that did, like Weyerhauser, often still hold mineral rights after selling off the land.
gist 10y ago
This raises the interesting question of what is better. To pay $4 per year or to buy out the obligation for a higher amount. To buy out it would have to be an amount which compensates to make up for what would be lost in the future (how do you even calculate that). To pay in advance for X years creates a problem as well. Hard to forget to pay every year, harder to keep track of something that needs to be paid every 20 or even 100 years. Excess paperwork overhead.
- caboteria 10y ago
  Yup, and it's been interesting to see the approach the different churches have taken. My town is a land grant town, so the Unitarians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians own large tracts of land that are tied up in 999-year leases. The Episcopalians view this as a bother and they'll basically give up the freehold if you pay all the lawyer's fees. The UU's, on the other hand, are taking the long view and won't sell the leasehold; at least the offer I made (granted, at a cocktail party) was politely refused.
  - trhway 10y ago
    > The UU's, on the other hand, are taking the long view and won't sell the leasehold; different churches have different interpretations of the scriptures, thus in particular different estimations of when the Second Coming and Apocalypses is to happen, etc. :)
- Denzel 10y ago
  Calculating the present value of a perpetual annuity seems appropriate.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  > how do you even calculate that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value#Present_value_of_a_perpetuity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value#Present_value_of...
euyyn 10y ago
If you owed me $4, I'd be much happier with a duckling.
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  For about a day, then you'd probably pay $100 for someone to take it.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    How about cooking it?
    - whamlastxmas 10y ago
      If you can slaughter and dress one of the cutest things in nature then you are a broken soul. I am joking of course. I would have not problem killing a cow/chicken with my own hands to eat it, but I don't think I could ever bring myself to kill a bunny or duckling or similarly cute animal. My heart swoons when I see them. I'm a pretty stone faced guy most of the time, but I think I would literally shed a tear.
      - david-given 10y ago
        My grandparents dropped out of retirement in Australia, bought a smallholding, and raised pigs, chickens and calves for most of the rest of their lives. My grandmother had no trouble slaughtering their livestock ("Oh, Bully was such a sweet calf," she'd say, chewing her way through a steak), but apparently there were a couple of smallholdings down the road which couldn't bear to kill their own pigs. To solve this, they would swap pigs with each other.
    - lttlrck 10y ago
      A duckling?
    - anentropic 10y ago
      you'd need dozens of them
forinti 10y ago
Certain parts do Rio de Janeiro are "owned" by the heirs of the royal family and every time someone sells property they get a cut. Brazil has been a republic since 1889.
bshimmin 10y ago
Since no one else has mentioned it, in the UK (and other Commonwealth countries) these are called "peppercorn" rents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(legal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(legal) On my previous house, we had a leasehold of just our garage, oddly, with a peppercorn rent of £1 a year. Being young and innocent, I did ask whether I actually had to pay this, but my solicitor just laughed.
- ColinDabritz 10y ago
  For the other side of that laugh, see Richard Feynman's "I want my dollar!" story: http://www.e-reading.mobi/chapter.php/71262/33/Feynman_-_Surely_Youre_Joking,_Mr._Feynman__Adventures_of_a_Curious_Character.html http://www.e-reading.mobi/chapter.php/71262/33/Feynman_-_Sur... (Find "I want my dollar!" toward the bottom of the page) It turns out there was technical paperwork signing over patent rights to the government at a dollar each...
  - danieltillett 10y ago
    I remember asking the same thing when I was a young researcher at my university too. I never got my dollar.
- inopinatus 10y ago
  My grandmother lived most of her life in an enormous Edwardian apartment in Hampstead, North London. The place was worth over GBP3MM last I looked, but she paid the fixed rent of seventy pounds a year that had been negotiated in the 1930s with no termination or renegotiation possible until she left in the late '90s. (Note: the relative value of seventy pounds in 1930 isn't a simple conversion, because economic conditions have changed. See https://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/relativevalue.php?use%5B%5D=CPI&use%5B%5D=NOMINALEARN&year_early=1930&pound71=70&shilling71=&pence71=&amount=70&year_source=1930&year_result=2016 https://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/relativevalue.php?u... for a discussion).
Yhippa 10y ago
How much is it worth to you for me to create Duckling as a Service (DaaS)?

pavel_lishin 10y ago

How did you come to own a house that's built on land you don't own? And aren't you worried about what may happen in the future?

awqrre 10y ago
Nobody really owns the land their house is built on in the USA... stop paying your property taxes (rent) and you'll see who owns it.
- znpy 10y ago
  I was waiting for someone to point this out. Have my upvote.
- pklausler 10y ago
  It's you, and you're in arrears on a tax obligation. Did I get it right?
  - awqrre 10y ago
    I don't owe any taxes, but finding the ones that do is a good way to find cheap properties...
- GavinMcG 10y ago
  This is such a tired claim. Every civilization ever has been built under the aegis of, if no one else, each other. Of course you own it. The question is what "ownership" means. Ownership of a property is best defined by delineating the specific rights that you can exercise with respect to it. You may bar people from entering it. You might not be able to bar the government from entering it or making certain uses of it. There's a good chance you can't keep people from being underneath your house and extracting valuable minerals, if they're far enough down. Your rights don't extend very far above the earth. But you knew all that when you made the purchase.
  - markdown 10y ago
    > There's a good chance you can't keep people from being underneath your house and extracting valuable minerals 6ft in my (Commonwealth) country. Have always found it cool that ordinary Americans operate their own oil wells on their (sometimes small) properties.
  - awqrre 10y ago
    > But you knew all that when you made the purchase. and you didn't have any other options.
    - GavinMcG 10y ago
      There's this underlying assumption that people seem to have that they have an absolute right to have absolute control over some piece of land. I'm really confused where that comes from. Was it that way in the past? I suppose, in various places and eras. But far more common was that you had enough power to deter the powerful around you, and you were for all intents and purposes a state. I can understand wanting to be a state, but you don't have a right to be one.
- chrisbennet 10y ago
  I suppose you can think of that way. But consider that the reason you are able to "own" any property is because there is a legal system in place(1). In someplace without an operating rule of law, a warlord could easily take "your" property. Even if you're a King, if you stop paying your knights/army you probably won't hold on to your lands for much longer. Would you say (A) the army "owns" the king's land or (B) the army just makes it possible for him to continue owning it? (1) Unless you are a Law unto yourself i.e. have your own army.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    It's not just a way of thinking about it - it's the actual legal arrangement. In pretty much every state today, you don't own any land (unless you're a monarch, or a noble with an ancient allodial title) - you own an estate in land, but the government (or the monarch in person) owns the actual land.
    - Torgo 10y ago
      you used to be able to get a thing called an allodial title, but it's basically extinct now.
- jpt4 10y ago
  Primary versus secondary property, sovereign and allodial versus infeudinated ownership. Different in autonomous kind due to a difference in degree of autarky.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- dugmartin 10y ago
  You are right - I ran across this a few years ago which surprised me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_simple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_simple We all must pay service to our feudal lords.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    It's not necessarily a bad thing - it's how you take a legacy system and adapt it to the new conditions without too much breakage. By making the government, in effect, the one and only feudal lord in its jurisdiction, and every land owner its vassal, the existing laws and precedent retain meaning, so you don't have to start from scratch - just change the things that need fixing.
- tehwalrus 10y ago
  The land, the land, 'twas God who made the land, The land, the land, The ground on which we stand, Why should we be beggars With the ballot in our hand? God gave the land to the people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_(song) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Land_(song)
throwawayReply 10y ago
It's quite common (in the UK) to have properties that haev a leasehold but not freehold. Generally speaking leases are cheap and long (100 years?) and get renewed decades before the lease term ends. It does reduce the property value a little.
- MrUnderhill 10y ago
  Quite common here in Norway as well, especially for cabins and holiday homes. Interestingly, as recently as 2012, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that landowners were allowed to change the terms of land leases when they came up for renewal, overruling the national supreme court [1]. Before that, they were obliged to offer the exact same terms, adjusted only for inflation. [1] http://www.newsinenglish.no/2012/06/13/lease-holders-now-on-shaky-ground/ http://www.newsinenglish.no/2012/06/13/lease-holders-now-on-...
  - Someone 10y ago
    On a hundred year bond, "adjusted for inflation" can already be a nasty surprise (5% inflation a year over a century gives you about a 2^7 multiplication factor, or two zeroes)
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      Why would that be a nasty surprise? The real value is unchanged. Unless you're saying the adjustment only happens at renewal, and not annually?
      - akvadrako 10y ago
        Often that's the case and in some countries you typically owe the whole value for the next 40 years when it's renewed. Of course it could be absorbed in the mortgage.
- tzs 10y ago
  It happens here in the US in Washington, too, with houses on Indian reservations owned by people who are not part of the tribe. They have long leases (around 100 years) on the land, and own the house on top of the land. The terms of the leases typically require that the lessee return the land to its original condition when the lease expires, which means demolishing or moving the house and replanting appropriate vegetation, but I've read that usually the tribe will accept the lessee leaving and turning the house over to the tribe. If you are ever buying a house in Washington and see something that seems too good to be true, like a beachfront house at a low price, look carefully for something about a land lease. The practice of leasing land from tribes and building houses on it goes back a long way, and some of the early leases are expiring in a few years.
fludlight 10y ago
This is not uncommon. In China, the government owns all of the land and grants long-term leases to people. It happens stateside, too. For example, all of the land in Irvine, California is (was?) owned by the Irvine Company and the people living on it own the structures but lease the land.
- btilly 10y ago
  Very much is. As well as a lot of other cities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine_Company says that the company owns about 1/5 of Orange County. Including several cities. One of those cities is Anaheim, so that suggests that Disney is leasing the land for Disneyland from the Irvine Company!
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Curiously, many cities are organised as corporations, though I'm not entirely sure of the specifics of this. I don't believe most lay claim to the land within their boundaries.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Historically, residents/property owners have often chosen to form a municipal corporation which basically creates a layer of government. In the case of the Irvine Company, it's the descendant of the Irvine Ranch which never sold off most of its land holdings.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        The story of the development of the Los Angeles basin is an interesting one that I've been going through over the past few days. "Why does Los Angeles even exist?" being one question. "Why did it out-grow San Francisco?" being another. The 1906 quake and topography likely had a lot to do with it. Just at the time the Westward migration really started in earnest, San Francisco burnt down, and LA didn't have to build any bridges to get between places. Mix up some oil and water for added fun.
wil421 10y ago
Certain lakes around where I live are owned by the Army Corp of Engineers. You can get a 100 year lease on the land you want and it's usually renewed with out hassle. I'm sure there are exceptions.
- alaxsxaq 10y ago
  Along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, there are hundreds of cabins, some now turned into year-round homes, that are on land leased in the early 1900's. In recent years, a number of issues have arisen to change the lease requirements and renewal terms. At least 100 of these properties are on land that has been given to conservation groups by the power company and those leases are not being renewed and the cabins are, slowly due to court battles, being razed.
  - wil421 10y ago
    When the dams were built they forced a few towns to relocate since they would be underwater. It's only relative. Where were the leaseholders when the decision was made to give the land away? Was it Army Corp land or Power company land?
x91982 10y ago
The real question (in Europe at least) is why the church and "nobility" are allowed to keep their land that has often been obtained by dubious means.
- vkou 10y ago
  Almost all land in America that's not owned by the indigenous population has been obtained by dubious means. Generally, might makes right.
- vkou 10y ago
  Much of the land in America that's not owned by the indigenous population has been obtained by dubious means. Generally, might makes right.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Many of whom obtained it by dubious means from different tribes of indigenous peoples.
- Veen 10y ago
  If you look back far enough, a huge amount of the land we live on was obtained by violence, theft, or deception. If the first person in the chain of ownership got it by dubious means, they had no right to sell it, and nor did the next person, and so on. By convention, we don't look that far back and ask people to prove their right to ownership. Further back than time immemorial[1] and it's just accepted without further justification. As for royalty and the church, the United Kingdom is not a republic: it's a constitutional monarchy with an established church (the church is part of the state and the monarch is head of the church). There may come a time when the church is disestablished (against the wishes of the antidisestablishmentarians — never thought I'd have a chance to use that word on Hacker News) and the monarchy abolished, but for the moment that's what we have and there's no real justification for "removing" the property of either. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_immemorial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_immemorial
  - arethuza 10y ago
stonogo 10y ago
It's common in the US, and institutionalized to the point that the homeowner is in no danger of the 'landlord' revoking the lease. It is frequently historical and in such cases most states require by law the landholder to 'sell' the land to the homeowner on request, usually for a trifling sum. The term for this in the mid-Atlantic is "ground rent," if you want to look for more info.
arethuza 10y ago
I don't know about the rest of the UK but here in Scotland if you build property on someone else's land the property belongs to them (NB I've never seen a leasehold in Scotland but feudalism was only officially abolished a few years back!).
- gozur88 10y ago
  It makes some sense from a practical standpoint. It would get pretty sticky if your tenant built a house and then demanded you stay away from it even after the rental agreement lapsed.
- thiviost 10y ago
  In Germany, too. A house and the land on which it stands do not form distinct properties but only one, the reasoning is they are physically connected and the house cannot be separated from the land while still being used as a house. The GDR had in the years of its existence softened this doctrine due to its ideological despice for property in general and their conception of public property (sort of modern fief: delegation of usage rights) in particular. Under this conception it was possible to have separate ownership in buildings. This was more or less a incentive and financing game: let the populace build the buildings out of their own savings, and as long we have not abolished property altogether, they might as well own the buildings. However the land registration (Grundbuch) normally includes the buildings. This was however handled differently for different types of buildings. Apartment houses were more properly documented, smaller buildings (holiday homes, garages) nearly never. This was a big problem after reunification, because buying a realty, one could not be sure if there remained rights from third parties to the buildings on the realty. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkseigentum#Sachenrechtsbereinigung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkseigentum#Sachenrechtsbere...
int_19h 10y ago
There's also such a thing as "mineral rights", which is separate from land ownership. Hereabouts (Western WA), a lot of land that is built up used to be logged, and the companies that did, like Weyerhauser, often still hold mineral rights after selling off the land.

gist 10y ago

This raises the interesting question of what is better. To pay $4 per year or to buy out the obligation for a higher amount. To buy out it would have to be an amount which compensates to make up for what would be lost in the future (how do you even calculate that). To pay in advance for X years creates a problem as well. Hard to forget to pay every year, harder to keep track of something that needs to be paid every 20 or even 100 years. Excess paperwork overhead.

caboteria 10y ago
Yup, and it's been interesting to see the approach the different churches have taken. My town is a land grant town, so the Unitarians, Congregationalists, and Episcopalians own large tracts of land that are tied up in 999-year leases. The Episcopalians view this as a bother and they'll basically give up the freehold if you pay all the lawyer's fees. The UU's, on the other hand, are taking the long view and won't sell the leasehold; at least the offer I made (granted, at a cocktail party) was politely refused.
- trhway 10y ago
  > The UU's, on the other hand, are taking the long view and won't sell the leasehold; different churches have different interpretations of the scriptures, thus in particular different estimations of when the Second Coming and Apocalypses is to happen, etc. :)
Denzel 10y ago
Calculating the present value of a perpetual annuity seems appropriate.
smallnamespace 10y ago
> how do you even calculate that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value#Present_value_of_a_perpetuity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_value#Present_value_of...

euyyn 10y ago

If you owed me $4, I'd be much happier with a duckling.

whamlastxmas 10y ago
For about a day, then you'd probably pay $100 for someone to take it.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  How about cooking it?
  - whamlastxmas 10y ago
    If you can slaughter and dress one of the cutest things in nature then you are a broken soul. I am joking of course. I would have not problem killing a cow/chicken with my own hands to eat it, but I don't think I could ever bring myself to kill a bunny or duckling or similarly cute animal. My heart swoons when I see them. I'm a pretty stone faced guy most of the time, but I think I would literally shed a tear.
    - david-given 10y ago
      My grandparents dropped out of retirement in Australia, bought a smallholding, and raised pigs, chickens and calves for most of the rest of their lives. My grandmother had no trouble slaughtering their livestock ("Oh, Bully was such a sweet calf," she'd say, chewing her way through a steak), but apparently there were a couple of smallholdings down the road which couldn't bear to kill their own pigs. To solve this, they would swap pigs with each other.
  - lttlrck 10y ago
    A duckling?
  - anentropic 10y ago
    you'd need dozens of them

forinti 10y ago

Certain parts do Rio de Janeiro are "owned" by the heirs of the royal family and every time someone sells property they get a cut. Brazil has been a republic since 1889.

bshimmin 10y ago

Since no one else has mentioned it, in the UK (and other Commonwealth countries) these are called "peppercorn" rents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(legal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(legal) On my previous house, we had a leasehold of just our garage, oddly, with a peppercorn rent of £1 a year. Being young and innocent, I did ask whether I actually had to pay this, but my solicitor just laughed.

ColinDabritz 10y ago
For the other side of that laugh, see Richard Feynman's "I want my dollar!" story: http://www.e-reading.mobi/chapter.php/71262/33/Feynman_-_Surely_Youre_Joking,_Mr._Feynman__Adventures_of_a_Curious_Character.html http://www.e-reading.mobi/chapter.php/71262/33/Feynman_-_Sur... (Find "I want my dollar!" toward the bottom of the page) It turns out there was technical paperwork signing over patent rights to the government at a dollar each...
- danieltillett 10y ago
  I remember asking the same thing when I was a young researcher at my university too. I never got my dollar.
inopinatus 10y ago
My grandmother lived most of her life in an enormous Edwardian apartment in Hampstead, North London. The place was worth over GBP3MM last I looked, but she paid the fixed rent of seventy pounds a year that had been negotiated in the 1930s with no termination or renegotiation possible until she left in the late '90s. (Note: the relative value of seventy pounds in 1930 isn't a simple conversion, because economic conditions have changed. See https://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/relativevalue.php?use%5B%5D=CPI&use%5B%5D=NOMINALEARN&year_early=1930&pound71=70&shilling71=&pence71=&amount=70&year_source=1930&year_result=2016 https://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/relativevalue.php?u... for a discussion).

Yhippa 10y ago

How much is it worth to you for me to create Duckling as a Service (DaaS)?