Unhinged Reactions: Federal Lands Edition

By Stephen Slivinski of Cato.

"There are a few safe bets on outrageous online reactions to proposed government policies. Unhinged hyperventilation over very modest proposals to sell federal land seems to be one of them.

A recent proposal by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources directs the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service to auction off a combined 1 to 1.5 percent of federally owned land to private owners for the express purpose of building new housing in 11 western states.

To see the overheated reaction from opponents, you’d think the committee was proposing to build casinos along the rim of the Grand Canyon and Olive Gardens in Yellowstone. There was pearl-grasping over the perceived acreage (“It’s equal to the size of Connecticut!”) and revulsion over transferring ownership rights of federally owned land to private owners (“This land is our birthright!”).

The proposal is indeed modest: as noted already, it’s no more than 1.5 percent of what is currently federally owned land in 11 of the 20 largest states in the US. Together, those states equal 1.7 million square miles. Tiny Connecticut amounts to 0.3 percent of that 11-state landmass.

Assuming the feds max out this allotment (which they are not required to do), there’s a rather lengthy multi-year process to sell the land, including getting approval from the state and local governments (including tribal governments if applicable) where each parcel is located. 

And that’s the big myth in all of this: these are not beautiful national parks with breathtaking vistas. This is mostly land in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management, the agency that oversees the purchase and management of land that, when the bureau was created in 1946, was described as “the land nobody wanted.”

Plus, the land has to be deemed suitable for housing development, specifically, as determined by the aforementioned process and prioritizing attributes such as being adjacent to already developed areas and having access to existing infrastructure.

This isn’t the first time such a proposal has been put forward—or, for that matter, been enacted. There’s a version of this that has already been in place in the geographic zones along the outskirts of Las Vegas for most of the past 30 years. That one was also designed specifically to increase the land available to build new housing, and, unlike this proposal, which requires the land to be sold at market price, that land was to be sold at a discount.

The author of that proposal? Well-known fire-breathing free-market radical Sen. Harry Reid (D‑NV).

Friendly reminder: Cato’s been on this case for quite some time." 

How Private Citizens Saved Central Park

Great post by Mark Perry of "Carpe Diem."

"Who's in charge of maintaining Central Park in Manhattan (pictured above)? The city of New York using taxpayer money and unionized public employees, right? Well, Wrong!

From Laura Vanderkam in the City Journal (emphasis mine):

"Perhaps the most amazing thing about Central Park is how little tax money goes into maintaining it. Though it is still ultimately the city’s responsibility, the park has been managed since the 1980s by the nonprofit Central Park Conservancy, and it relies on private donations for most of its budget. The marriage between the city and the Conservancy has been a fruitful one. Can this model, known as a public-private partnership, restore and invigorate all of New York’s green spaces, including neighborhood parks in less affluent areas? It’s an important question, not only as the city faces tough fiscal times but as urban planners increasingly view parks as tools of economic development and public health.

People who lived in New York in the 1970s and early 1980s still remember how forbidding the parks were in those dark days. Douglas Blonsky, now head of the Central Park Conservancy and thus Central Park’s administrator, recalls that when he started working there in 1985, most of the benches were broken and most surfaces sported layers of graffiti. “The Great Lawn was a dust bowl,” he says, at least when the weather was dry; when it rained, seas of mud meant that “you could barely walk through the park for days.”

But where “government had given up,” citizens stepped in. In 1980, landscape designer Elizabeth Barlow Rogers and others founded the Central Park Conservancy, whose original purpose was to raise money, stop the park’s decline, and restore several of its major landmarks. The city eventually gave the Conservancy the lion’s share of day-to-day control of the park. Because its workers weren’t organized into public-sector unions, the Conservancy had a great deal of freedom to institute private management practices—above all, emphasizing accountability. The park is now divided into 49 sections, with a master gardener responsible for the condition of each. About 85 percent of the Conservancy’s annual budget comes from private donations, mostly from people who live within a ten-minute walk of the park. “Obviously, it’s an incredible backyard, and look what it does to your real-estate values,” says Blonsky.""