I live next to a State Park. It sounded really cool when I bought the house. No neighbors! Privacy! There is a trail accessible from my properly that goes into some woods, which you only want to be in during the Fall / Spring because the ticks and chiggers are intense.
The biggest issue with sharing a border with the state is the fence line. Technically it's on them to maintain. The woods are filled with mostly 200 foot trees. They exist right up to my property and fall every year during big storms. There goes the fence line. I have dogs so the fence is important. Otherwise they run out into the woods that have licensed bow-hunting during the Winter.
In practice its impossible to get the fence fixed. You are working through layers of bureaucracy and mismanagement. There is no vested interest from a parks service to work well with hundreds of neighbors individually. I'd build fence lines myself, and could easily pay for it, but it's the upkeep of those fences that would be difficult because so many trees (really, it's every year) fall down from their side.
My main point is that sharing a properly line with the government is more like sharing a properly line with nobody. You may as well own that land. Don't expect any upkeep and go in with eyes open.
This is absolutely NOT uniformly true in practice.
The land is owned by The State, which represents The People, and is VERY different from "owned by nobody / everybody"
Whether that land operates as something closer to "basically everybody's" or as something closer to "the King's enclosure you better not mess with" is often down to not just the jurisdiction but also the particular land manager in charge at the moment.
In many jurisdictions, you actually have more liberty on unposted private land (that you don't own) than on public lands. And the penalty for overstepping that liberty is often at most a civil infraction on private land but the same overstep can be a felony on public lands.
Maybe the cleanest way of thinking about this: your neighbor, The State, is pretty chill about you coming on their land sometimes, which is really cool! But they also have a huge book of rules you better not break when you do come on their land. (And unlike Billy on your other fence line this neighbor employs a modestly sized posse of between hundreds and tens of thousands of armed enforcers if you get it wrong ;-).)
If you wouldn’t even pay for it yourself, as pretty much the sole beneficiary and someone who could afford it but would rather the money go elsewhere, why would it make sense for other taxpayers to pay for it?
Isn’t the premise of “you may as well own that land” the entire appeal of living next to public land anyway?
My default presumption, without checking with them directly, is not only that it would not be allowed, but that this is also very much not a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" situation either. Even just asking the question can draw attention from them you may not want.
The ready accessibility of the land is advantageous in some ways, but as neighbors the state can be quite nasty. Your other neighbors don't tend to have anywhere near the regulatory firepower to make sure you comply with what they want.
Which is hardly the end of the world, but it can definitely grind the gears to be spending thousands when you could fix the problem for several hundreds, if not perhaps several tens, of dollars if they wouldn't be assholes about it. But I would absolutely advise anyone in that situation to spend the thousands and not bank on the state not being assholes about it.
I can also add that you can't even be sure that if you got away with it for years that you will continue to get away with it. The particular issue that my father got into a bit of hassle with the state about is that he accidentally put a pole barn across the state line. Didn't mean to, but he misread the survey markers. Fortunately, they let him remediate it at his expense without pursuing the matter any further legally... but it means they did, after several years of it being there, come through a with a survey team and verify that nobody on the border was crossing into their land, and anything they found they made the residents fix no matter how many years the deviation had been there. All the laws about such thing between two citizens mean nothing to the state.
Oh no. Tbe preposterous idea of putting a fence around your own property.
Which is a fine option, but it should be something agreed to by both parties. You can't just hand over a cost like that, and if you buy property with some kind of agreement this choice is baked into the original price. It makes perfect sense for the government to uphold agreements it has made.
Secondly - if they did own the fence line, it'd be on the government to come and fix it when one of their trees breaks it, surely?
The key question is what is actually in the agreement. 'The state will maintain the fence' doesn't indicate the level of maintenance or the timeliness of said maintenance, it just means the neighbor isn't allowed to do it.
> Secondly - if they did own the fence line, it'd be on the government to come and fix it when one of their trees breaks it, surely?
From discussions I've seen, generally there's no legal responsibility for tree falls, unless there's neglegence like ignoring a clearly failing tree. But leaving a forest to do whatever the forest wants doesn't feel like neglegence.
There is no agreement whatsoever, that's the point. No agreement was made or mentioned. The mere existence of a fence on government property does not constitute an agreement to maintain said fence.
We're on the same page.
If you start actively managing it (removing invasive species, dead trees etc.) the state can take a more active interest at any time and sue/fine you into oblivion.
And if it’s your fence you can build one of the ones that’s cheap and easy to replace. I wouldn’t be shocked if you could put chain link back up after some straightening. You could use the downed tree to fix the fence if it was split log (not so good at keeping dogs in though)
Honestly i do not know the full scope of this one, but if there's one thing I've learnt from observing her work over the last decade...it's humans need to stop adding chemicals to water bodies with the goal of thinking they're helping something.
I can imagine her having some long explanation about the unknown risks of man spreading this substance, even if its not a chemical agent. I lean on the edge of listening to Grandpa Simpson on these kind of things: https://i.imgur.com/MdjduDH.png
It might well be safe, but the question is what are the downstream affects of reducing the population of mosquitos (or other bugs in the water that this substance impacts). Maybe they've exclusively positive, but I assure you determining that is no walk in the park.
In what state? Last I knew, the State Parks in most US states were miserably underfunded - so quick fixes (for pretty much anything, not just fences) just ain't gonna happen.
And what's the legal status of the fallen trees? In a fair number of places a 200' tree, already down, might be kinda valuable.
Everyone then scrapes or subscribes to the MLS data. It's why you have a dozen identical realty sites: Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, Trulia, etc.
When I look for a parcel of land, I'm also interested in proximity to healthcare, groceries, airports (bad!), motor sports, shooting ranges; general steepness of the property particularly at the roadway (too steep makes the property unusable), topography in general (any flat spots to build a house?); availability of power; water features; bikability (checked by looking at Strava's heatmap); average number of days temperature > 85F; average number of days temperature < 30F. There's more but this list is long enough already.
Really curious about your data sources. Where are you getting all this stuff?
- Listings: RentCast's API (licensed), pulled weekly.
- Parcel boundaries: state and county GIS services where they publish statewide parcels (about 20 states), and Realie (licensed) for the rest.
- Public land: USGS PAD-US 4.1, filtered to fee-owned, open-access land of 50+ acres.
- Elevation: USGS 3DEP point queries. Roads: Census TIGER. Flood: FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. Wildfire: Forest Service Wildfire Hazard Potential (2023). ZIP search: Census ZCTA centroids.
The free state parcel services were the biggest hunt: every state publishes differently, and a couple that looked open turned out to be test or internal-use-only endpoints.
Most of the listings near me are for tens of acres and >$5 million
Regardless, neat site. Couple things, first maybe a disclaimer on why you would want this on the home page? And on the state page itself I can't tell how bordering is different than adjacent. IMO just calling it "within 75m" would be better, and since this is for the US consider making it based on feet :p. Also, I would recommend that at least for user facing strings though you give it a little TLC and remove the really really obvious Claudisms
> official boundary maps, not listing descriptions.
> An analysis of publicly available boundary data — not a survey, and not a listing service
plus everything on the How It Works page is extremely obviously LLM.
On people crossing over: it depends a great deal on the land. Next to state game lands you'll see hunters in season; next to a big national forest you may rarely see anyone. It's very dependent on individual perspective and location.
Bordering vs adjacent: bordering means the parcel lines actually touch and there's a measured shared edge; adjacent means no shared edge but within about 250 ft (usually a road or a strip of other land in between). You're right that the state pages don't make that clear, and feet is the better unit for a US site. Tho most US geospatial data is published in metric lol.
And fair point on the copy. I run a small design studio and built this in my free time, I leaned on AI for a lot of the site text. The "Why this exists" section on How it works is my own story, but the rest deserves a pass in my own voice.
So that's why the site text reads as AI slop.
Sure, there's the ability to hike directly from your home, but I imagine you'll regularly have people wander on to your property. And if something illegal happens on your property by a different party, you might be liable.
Seems like the cons outweigh the pros. Or is there something I'm missing?
American Prairie in Montana is an example going the other way: a nonprofit buying private land that surround public land and opening them to the public. It's somewhat contentious locally, but it shows how much the private parcels around public land shape who can actually use it.
How does the typical suburban family look like? Did all 3-4-5 of you drive F150s there?
Other people deserve access to public land too but might not pass the vibe check of the private guards, which is what op was lamenting as well.
Well, that depends on how large and obvious your property is.
Assuming you have a typical suburban 1/2 acre or 1 acre property, the simplest thing to do is put up a fence, or otherwise make sure that there are no trails that go over the property you use.
Otherwise, you need some kind of bounds marking and obvious "no trespassing" signs.
FWIW: The site identified public lands near my house that have a lot of trails on it. There are trails that go right behind peoples' yards, and most of them either have fences or sheds that make it obvious where the bounds are.
Also a concern is proximity to fracking and now data centers. Not sure how to see if neighbors sold their underground…
As an anecdote, my parent’s home, where I grew up, is a small plot along my town’s watershed property. When the price of lumber went up recently, the town council conveniently remembered that the watershed property was once a massive “tree farm,” and since has leveled all of the surrounding woods. We never expected this. It has been emotionally crushing.
As somebody who is constantly looking for property adjacent to BLM this is a really good resource.
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye...
How it works, once a week:
1. About 700,000 active U.S. listings come in from a licensed listings API.
2. Each listing near public land gets its county parcel boundary, from state and county GIS services where they publish them and from a licensed parcel provider elsewhere. With no boundary, the page says so and measures from the listing point, but never claims a shared edge.
3. Public land is USGS PAD-US 4.1, narrowed to land an agency actually owns (Category = Fee, so no conservation easements), that's open to the public, and that's at least 50 acres.
4. Parcel and public land are compared in a local metric projection (shapely/geopandas): within (an inholding), bordering (the boundaries touch, and the shared edge is measured in feet), or adjacent (within 75 m, about a road's width).
Each property also gets the size of the connected public land behind it, its elevation (USGS 3DEP), road access (Census TIGER roads), FEMA flood zone and Forest Service wildfire hazard. The output is about 16,000 static pages with Leaflet maps on Cloudflare Pages, rebuilt every Monday on a Mac mini. ZIP search looks the ZIP up in your browser from Census centroids, so nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Things that were harder than expected:
- Lot sizes sometimes arrive in square feet in the acres field. A Birmingham, AL listing came through at 7,000 acres. Sizes are now checked against price, property type and the parcel itself, and corrected or withheld with a note.
- Condo and subdivision listings often resolve to the association's common tract, so a single town lot can appear to share miles of boundary. Those are flagged as shared parcels.
- PAD-US stores some units as one multipart polygon. My first "connected public land" figure for one Montana property was 69.7 million acres, about three-quarters of the state. Units are now split into pieces and joined only where they actually touch.
- Road centerlines and lot lines come from different agencies and are often tens of meters apart, so "does a road touch this parcel" needs a tolerance, and frontage only counts where the boundary runs along the road.
It's free, with no account and no cookies. There are free weekly email alerts for any search, starting Monday. I'd especially like to hear from anyone who has bought rural land: what should it measure that it doesn't?
What API is that? It looks like you or the data broker are violating some NAR / MLS / State Compliance rules to me. You might want to look into those.
https://www.rentcast.io/terms-api
> You and We acknowledge and agree that, in the event of a third-party claim arising out of or relating to your access to or use of the RentCast API, or your possession, use, disclosure, display, resale, or distribution of the API Data, including any claim that such activities infringe any third-party’s intellectual property rights or do not comply with applicable laws and/or regulations, you, and not Us, will be responsible for the investigation, defense, settlement, and discharge of any such claim. You will promptly notify Us in writing of any such claim.
If you're up for a chat, please ping me! This is pretty cool and I'm wondering if theres a collaboration, or if I can straight up use some of what you've made.
