Though I welcome citations to prove the matter one way or the other, I suspect that the 18th-century Lockean concept of natural rights which informed the founders of the USA, saw ownership of private property as a right and not a government-created privilege. That is, if one claimed land on what was seen as terra nullius, or if a person’s family had owned the lank back to time immemorial, then the land was rightfully theirs regardless of government recognition or not. State recognition in the form of deeds would only have represented something useful for dispute resolution, and did not imply that the state was granting any rights.
We should be demanding the government cede control of the land, instead of pleading for the government to give us a smidgen of what it does not rightfully possess!
Everyone needs a place to live and land is a finite resource. Plus, foreign investors love to use real estate to park money. Government doesn't seem to be the problem here. People will pay what they have to to avoid being homeless. At the same time, developers will build what's most profitable: luxury housing. The market won't fix the problem, so we the people, by way of government, should.
0: https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...
1: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sV5ETXDs_8M/Ux-axBTuF2I/AAAAAAAAA...
Their land was just to be taken by violence. Hence without government created privilege all your are left with is a dog-eat dog world where the strongest through violence will take land for himself.
European settlers would respect each others claim of land mostly, but it basically meant it was in principle no different from an invading force stealing land.
Native Americans of course did not own land in the Lockean way. They held the land in common. The natural arrangement was in many ways closer to a communist/socialist ideal.
Really? I thought HK was notorious for it's housing crysis where you have people living in flats the size of closets. According to this[1] only 24 % of land is developed in HK (7 % is residential). My understanding is that the government does this on purpose because it makes the majority of its budget from this.
[1]: https://www.cedd.gov.hk/filemanager/eng/content_954/Info_She...
This is not to say that HK doesn't have a housing supply side problem, because it definitely does, but it's not just the government squatting of vast tracts of flat land.
I would instead favour making unproductive use of land exponentially expensive through taxation. However I admit the details of how that would be implemented are very fuzzy.
You obviously never had to pay actual rent in either place.
Who decides what inherent authority governments do and don't have?
The day, thousands of years ago, someone picked a fertile piece of land, cleared it, and started growing crops on it is the day private property of land was born.