We have Irish Travellers in the US, too, you know. They mainly stick to the east coast. Local police will publish warnings when they're coming through. They are likely the primary motivator for anti-caravan laws, the other being that caravans and trailer homes generally have negative curb appeal and depress nearby property values.

But "rural" in the US and "rural" in the UK are orders of magnitude apart. There are individual ranches in Texas larger than whole counties in the UK. The kinds of nomadic people that provoke anti-camping laws require a certain population density to support their lifestyle, so in the US, it's usually the NIMBYs that try to ban certain kinds of dwellings on other people's land. It's a question of how many people would even know something is there. If you never even see your mail carrier, you're not going to have a problem erecting any sort of building you want. But if you have neighbors that can see your dwelling from theirs, they will be interested in your private business.

So if you're in the middle of the wind farms and corn farms in northern Indiana, no one cares if you have a manufactured home on your land. If you're on undeveloped land just east of Denver, you can't even pitch a tent on your own property without a permit.

> Perhaps in your country...

Yes. That's what I was explaining. You can just do that in many rural areas of the U.S.

That's the big difference compared to urban development. You don't need billion dollar loans and a lobbying firm to add solve the problem on the supply side. It's very common for semi-retired middle class people to buy undeveloped land with good highway access, subdivide it, add some housing, and flip it.

Bah, UK is so small it’s easy to see how it can be a problem. America has so much land available out there, some of it is incredibly cheap the farther you are from civilization, even almost free. I think I could buy several rolling acres of land for a couple thousand bucks right now.

I can really only speak with experience with regards to Scotland here. The problem isn't that we don't have enough land to build on. The problem is that there are vast tracts of land owned by a few large estates (many of them owned by off-shored companies in the usual Caribbean tax havens) that will never normally be available for sale. The land is wasted and misused for the benefit of a few very rich folks who want to turn up and blow away pheasants and grouse with their shotguns.

The remaining available/eligible land is held by large house builders in their "land banks". Some of these tracts of land have been off the market for years and years, yet nothing ever gets built on them until the house builder decides the time is right to screw the maximum price out of buyers.

I'm kinda hoping that when Scotland does finally become independent we will solve these problems with radical land ownership reform.

Sounds like the situation is similar than to what a poster here is describing about NYC: AirBnB is taking away a tiny portion of housing, it matters a lot though because the government is making it hard to build because of zoning or similar constraints. We conclude it's easier to get rid of Airbnb than change what the government is doing although it's supposed to reorder us the people.

Do you guys have value based property tax, or is it a situation like California with prop 13? I've heard in the UK you just have council tax, which is more about the cost of providing services than the value of the piece of land.

Usually you deal with bad 'land hoarding' with a high enough property tax rate. And if you want to avoid effecting the old and the middle class, you add exemptions for primary residences.

We have two types of taxes:

Council Tax - a tax on residential properties. Properties fall into one of eight bands, A to H, where A is the least expensive and H is the most expensive. Your council tax bill is made up of the council tax itself which is the largest portion (goes to the council to pay for schools, libraries, street lights, etc). The remaining portion pays for water and sewerage.

Non Domestic Rates - businesses pay these. Water and sewerage are payable in addition. I don't know the ins and outs of how they're calculated.

Unfortunately land hoarding is an unresolved issue in the UK, there isn't as far as I know any penalty or charge - much of this land has no services or business activity so can't be taxed. There have been suggestions by some UK members of parliament that house builders should be forced into a "use it or lose it", thus far there's not been any official position from the government. I suspect the issue will be swept under the table until the next time the media hoves round and puts this back in the spotlight again.

Yeah in the US, almost all property tax is charged on a valuation basis. You pay %1-%2 per year based on the assessed value of your property. If you have a $10 million empty lot, you'll be paying $100k per year, and land hoarding tends to take care of itself fairly quickly in that situation.

> Bah, UK is so small it’s easy to see how it can be a problem.

It's considerably less built up than most people think [1-2]. The problem is that our planning laws do not realise that farmland is an ecological desert, and so we're not allowed to build on most of the UK, pushing the value of the little land that can be built on through the roof.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/constructio...

A couple thousand dollars isnt going to get you anything but a couple acres of desert wasteland in the US. You might get a nicer piece of land for $20,000 but the sort of places where land is that cheap are often very rural. 45 minute drives to the nearest medical care or supermarket, and if you're lucky, maybe electric utility hookups (water, sewer, internet? good luck).

A desert wasteland is still land nonetheless. Great for land collectors. Best part about very rural areas, you can drive really fucking fast.