![]() Learn more about land surveys in this webinar! Florida title agents and agent attorneys are eligible for a Free CE/CLE credit! This system was commonly employed in the original thirteen colonies, as well as Kentucky and Tennessee.Įlsewhere in North America and especially on federal lands, the rectangular system was used to divide parcels into square-mile sections. While some of the demarcations listed, like a tree or a stone, may have adequately served to describe the land as it once was, such impermanent objects subvert their authority and reliability. This method is known as metes and bounds. ![]() Two major systems of measuring and describing land emerged in North America by settlers, but one has proven to be more successful than the other.įor centuries, landowners have been creating legal descriptions based on visual markers, long before using more exacting techniques like GPS surveying that provided more accurate coordinates. ![]() Without it, there would be no way to confirm the exact boundaries of the property being bought and sold. Please leave this field empty.The legal description or land description is an important part of a land survey and other instruments conveying the title of real property. In these two respects, centralized and rigid planning can actually be a libertarian reform, while ostensibly more flexible bargaining can lead to the strangulation of a city’s housing supply. By making it simple for outsiders to see what they are buying when they purchase a parcel, such plans attract more buyers, thereby increasing investment in housing. … Comprehensive plans also promote transparency and marketability for use rights in much the same way that a simple grid system promotes a market in possession rights. Those costs drive away real estate investors, depriving the city of capital sorely needed to remedy a desperate housing shortage. Second, individualized bargaining raises the costs of knowing what development rights one buys with the purchase of a lot. ![]() The result is excessive zoning restrictions created by a universal coalition against LULUs: each member votes for every other member’s proposals to keep LULUs out in expectation that every other member will do the same…. … Local legislatures tend to be too disorganized to enforce complex deals for allocating locally undesirable land uses (LULUs) across legislators’ districts. First, individualized bargains increase the chance that NIMBY neighbors will hijack local land to exclude housing because the individualized bargaining process provides no way for politicians representing different parts of the city to strike bargains allocating locally unwanted land uses across neighborhoods. In two important respects, this bargaining process defeats the very goal of land-use deregulation necessary for a lasting solution to the housing affordability crisis. Trevor O’Grady, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, has confirmed that properties on gridded blocks are both more valuable and more densely developed than properties with irregular boundaries in non-gridded areas. The grid had another advantage: rectangular lots made property rights easy to ascertain, reducing property disputes between neighbors and making it easier for outsiders to buy, sell, and improve real estate. With few deviations, the result was a uniform grid of numbered streets and avenues that, according to the commissioners, would lower the cost of construction because “strait-sided and right-angled houses” were cheaper and easier to build. In 1811, when New York was a city of just under 100,000 people residing almost entirely south of Houston Street, the state legislature authorized three street commissioners to create a uniform street grid covering almost all of Manhattan Island. Manhattan’s street grid suggests a similar effect of simple, uniform, and rectangular lot lines. Lots defined by rectangles and squares attracted more population, urbanized more quickly, and-despite the property owners’ power to customize their lots after the initial demarcation-retained their geometrical boundaries long after they were initially demarcated. Comparing “metes and bounds” lots (the boundaries of which are defined by irregular and individualized lines often following natural boundaries like hills, trees, and streams) with “rectangles and squares” (a system that originally allocated properties in standardized rectangular and square lots), Lueck and Libecap determined that “rectangles and squares” demarcation results in property values that are roughly 30 percent higher than “metes and bounds”-an effect persisting 200 years after the original demarcation. Dean Lueck (University of Arizona) and Gary Libecap (University of California, Santa Barbara) have confirmed empirically that the existence of easily ascertained boundaries can substantially increase property values.
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