I would not be surprised if the same kind of scenario is happening somewhere in the US, but I doubt it is common enough to make any difference to land use stati

I would not be surprised if the same kind of scenario is happening somewhere in the US, but I doubt it is common enough to make any difference to land use statistics. There’s always going to be edge cases where you can debate whether they should be counted as public or private, but so long as they are sufficiently rare, they disappear in the rounding of the statistics. Also, the term “private land state” is somewhat confusing (although officially correct), since private land states can still have extensive land holdings by state or local governments, and they can even have federal lands - it is just their federal lands were originally private land or non-federal public lands, unlike much of the federal lands in the public land states, which have been federal lands since the very beginning of US sovereignty over them