Land isn't perfectly fungible -- in fact, one of the cornerstones of the tech startup world is that land near SF, CA or Boston, MA is worth many orders of magni

Land isn't perfectly fungible -- in fact, one of the cornerstones of the tech startup world is that land near SF, CA or Boston, MA is worth many orders of magnitude more than land in eastern Iowa or western Texas for certain people. There's very little value in preserving any particular acre of land in Iowa (0.8%) -- they're all essentially the same, and the one thing that land is good for is growing corn/soybeans. Likewise with TX, as far as I know it's roughly a gradient of drilling for oil in the west to ranch land in the east. Unlike ranch land (generally uninteresting as park land) and farm land (crops would be destroyed by tourism), forest land (Washington state, and I assume a fair amount the mountainous portions of the other western states, as well) is a bit different in that the land can be used simultaneously as wood crop land and park space. On the east side of Seattle there are some large commercially owned forests that are legally obligated to provide public access for fishing, hunting, and mountain biking. You can achieve similar results with state ownership of the forest land and logging grants -- making the land valuable to hold as state (national) property. I think the TX poverty issue could be attributed to the low-profit land not supporting much more than the people it takes to operate it. The overwhelming amount of said space probably overshadows the (moderately-)positive effects of the big cities.