The Corner-Locked Report
12th March 2023
Over the past two centuries, legislation, random chance, and a variety of land deals have left the American West with a patchwork landscape of public and private land. Within the patchwork lie swaths of alternating sections of public and private land, like the squares of a checkerboard. At every point where four squares meet, there is a property corner ripe for controversy. With the issue of corner-crossing in the news again, we decided to leverage our strengths and drill down on the data. What we discovered was shocking in its scope.
March 13th, 2023 at 22:53
The reason this is such a common problem in your western states is because many of them have most of their land held by the federal government, unlike states admitted as states (Texas) or states created out of territories at an earlier date (Ohio). 84% of Nevada’s land area belongs to the federal government, which begs the question of whether Nevada is truly a real state. This problem never arose in Canada where all provinces either owned their public lands before joining the country as a province (British Columbia) or, if either created out of (Alberta) or extended into (Ontario) a federally-controlled territory, were given most of their public lands.