Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about the property ladder problem we've discussed before, specifically the triple whammy in Israel: savings erosion from renting, the real estate bubble, and down payment requirements that hit thirty percent of purchase price. His question is, what if you sidestep the whole thing and buy raw land to build on yourself? But that raises a deeper question: who owned the land before you showed up? Does truly free, unowned land exist anywhere on Earth anymore, or is every square meter already claimed by some state, corporation, or person?
This is one of those questions that sounds simple and then just unspools into centuries of legal history, colonial records, and Ottoman land registries. I love it.
Of course you do. So let's start with the obvious question: what does it actually mean to own land, and does every country define it the same way?
It doesn't, and they don't. At the highest level, there's something called allodial title — absolute ownership with no superior landlord. You own the land outright, no obligations to anyone. But allodial title barely exists anywhere. The United States technically recognizes it, but in practice, even the most absolute American property deed is what lawyers call fee simple — which means you own it subject to taxation, eminent domain, zoning laws, and the state's ultimate claim to sovereignty. The state can take it. You don't truly own it in the absolute sense.
The American dream of owning your own land is, legally speaking, more like a very confident lease with extra steps.
That's the dry Corn summary, and it's not wrong. Every system of land ownership has a superior interest somewhere. In the UK, the Crown owns all land of right — that's the doctrine of the Crown Estate. But in practice, about eighty-five percent of land in England and Wales is held as freehold, which is fee simple under a different name. The Crown's ownership is a legal abstraction. Nobody from Buckingham Palace is going to show up and reclaim your garden. But the chain of title always traces back to a Crown grant at some point in history.
Which brings us to Israel, where the listener's frustration lives. The state owns ninety-three percent of the land.
Right, and it's worth explaining the mechanics because they're genuinely unusual. Under the Basic Law: Israel Lands from nineteen sixty, the Israel Land Authority — the ILA — controls that ninety-three percent. The land isn't sold. It's leased. The standard lease is ninety-nine years, and you pay an annual lease fee — typically between half a percent and one percent of the property value. Now, there was a reform in twenty twenty-two that allowed some leasehold-to-freehold conversions, but only in specific zones, and only about two hundred thousand of one point five million leasehold properties were eligible. The conversion fee averaged three and a half percent of property value. So you're paying for the privilege of upgrading your lease to something closer to ownership.
Three and a half percent on top of everything else. It's like paying extra for the deluxe version of something you already thought you bought.
This connects directly to the listener's question about buying land to build. In Israel, when you buy a parcel, you're not buying land from someone who owned it outright. You're buying a lease assignment. The person selling to you got it from someone who got it from the Jewish National Fund or the Development Authority, who got it from the British Mandate administration, who got their records from the Ottoman Empire.
That Ottoman connection is where it gets weirdly specific.
It's my favorite part of this whole story. The Ottoman Land Code of eighteen fifty-eight created a land registry system that still echoes through property law in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan. The Ottomans classified land into categories — miri land, state-owned agricultural land granted to peasants for cultivation, and mulk land, private freehold, mostly in urban areas. When the British took over after World War One, they inherited those Ottoman registries. When Israel was established in nineteen forty-eight, it inherited the British version of the Ottoman records. So the question of who can build a house in Tel Aviv in twenty twenty-six traces back, in some cases, to an Ottoman tax official writing in Arabic script in eighteen fifty-nine.
If you're trying to buy raw land in Israel and trace the ownership chain, you eventually hit a guy with a fez and a ledger.
That's the poetic version. The practical version is that the chain always terminates at the state. There is no "first sale" from an unowned condition. The land was either Ottoman state land, or British Mandate state land, or it was purchased by the Jewish National Fund from Ottoman landowners and then transferred to the state. Every chain ends at a government.
Which raises the question: is Israel an outlier, or is this the global norm?
Israel is an outlier in the percentage, but not in the principle. Let me run through the spectrum. China — Article Ten of the Chinese Constitution states that urban land is owned by the state. Rural land is collectively owned by villages. There is no private freehold anywhere in China. You get land-use rights for seventy years for residential property, and when those rights expire, the government can renew them or not. It's leasehold with no path to freehold at all. So Israel's system, for all its complications, is actually more generous than China's because at least the conversion option exists.
On the other end?
About eighty-five percent of land is private freehold. Strong property rights, you can buy and sell freely. But Japan has its own weird barrier. In twenty twenty-four, they reformed the property tax system to penalize vacant land ownership. About four point four percent of all residential land is now classified as akiya — vacant or abandoned — and owners face tax penalties unless they sell or develop. There are millions of empty houses across rural Japan, and the government is essentially paying people to take them. You can get a house in some rural prefectures for essentially nothing. But you're not buying free land — you're buying an existing structure on land that someone else already owns, with a clear title chain. It's cheap entry, but it's not terra nullius.
That's the phrase I've been waiting for. No man's land. Does any actually exist?
There's exactly one habitable example, and it's a geopolitical punchline. It's called Bir Tawil. It's a trapezoid of desert — two thousand sixty square kilometers — wedged between Egypt and Sudan. Neither country claims it. And the reason neither claims it is because they both want the Hala'ib Triangle instead, the much more valuable piece of land on the Red Sea coast. The border between Egypt and Sudan was drawn twice by the British — once in eighteen ninety-nine along the twenty-second parallel, which would give Bir Tawil to Egypt and Hala'ib to Sudan, and once in nineteen oh-two based on tribal boundaries, which flips both. So each country insists on the border that gives them Hala'ib and sticks the other with Bir Tawil. Neither will claim Bir Tawil because doing so would weaken their claim to Hala'ib.
It's the last unclaimed habitable land on Earth, and the reason is that nobody wants it. That's almost too perfect.
It gets better. In twenty fourteen, a man from Virginia named Jeremiah Heaton traveled to Bir Tawil, planted a flag, and declared it the Kingdom of North Sudan so his seven-year-old daughter could be a princess. He even wrote to the United Nations. Nobody recognized it. The international community's position is that even if a territory is unclaimed, a private individual can't just show up and claim it without state backing. You need recognition from other states to be a state. So Bir Tawil is simultaneously the only free land on Earth and completely unclaimable.
Like adopting a feral cat that turns out to be a cardboard cutout.
That's — I'm going to think about that one for a minute. And Bir Tawil has no water, no infrastructure, no arable soil, temperatures that hit fifty degrees Celsius in summer. Even if you could claim it legally, you couldn't live there without importing everything. So the dream of finding unowned land and building your house on it runs into a practical wall: any land that's actually habitable is already claimed, and any land that's unclaimed is uninhabitable.
What about the big empty places?
Antarctica is governed by the Antarctic Treaty System. Seven countries have territorial claims, but the treaty froze all claims in nineteen fifty-nine. No new claims can be made. The largest unclaimed territory is Marie Byrd Land, about one point six million square kilometers, but the treaty prevents anyone from claiming it. And even if you could, the treaty also bans mining and military activity. You can't build a house there. It's a scientific preserve.
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea gives coastal states exclusive economic zones extending two hundred nautical miles from their shores. Beyond that is the high seas, which are owned by no one and governed by international law. You could theoretically build a structure on the high seas, and there's a whole seasteading movement dedicated to this idea. But you'd have no legal protection, no recognized sovereignty, and no way to enforce property rights against anyone who decided to show up and take your stuff. The high seas are free in the sense that nobody owns them, but they're not free in the sense that you can build a life there with any security.
The global picture is: virtually every habitable square meter is claimed. The only exceptions are a desert trapezoid nobody wants and a frozen continent you can't touch. That's the answer to the listener's first question. But it opens up a second question: how did all this land get claimed in the first place? What's the original chain?
This is where we need to talk about the United States and the Homestead Act, because it's the most recent large-scale example of a government deliberately transferring unclaimed land into private hands. The Homestead Act of eighteen sixty-two allowed any citizen — or intended citizen — to claim up to one hundred sixty acres of federal land. You had to live on it for five years, build a dwelling, and cultivate crops. If you did, the land was yours. Over its lifetime, the act transferred two hundred seventy million acres into private ownership — about ten percent of the total land area of the United States.
People assume this is still happening. The listener's prompt hints at it — the idea that there might be some remote patch of land you can just go claim.
That's one of the misconceptions we need to bust. The Homestead Act ended in nineteen seventy-six with the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. The last successful homestead claim was filed by Kenneth Deardorff in nineteen seventy-four on eighty acres in Alaska, and it wasn't finalized until nineteen seventy-nine. After that, the Bureau of Land Management stopped accepting homestead applications entirely. Today, BLM land — about two hundred forty-five million acres — is available for lease for grazing, mining, or recreation. But you cannot get residential freehold title to it. The era of free land in America ended almost fifty years ago.
Yet the cultural myth persists. Go west, stake your claim, build your cabin.
It's one of the most durable American myths, and it's completely disconnected from current law. What's interesting is that the myth itself shaped land policy globally. The idea that a nation could claim territory by sending settlers to occupy and cultivate it — that's the doctrine of terra nullius in its original colonial sense. The British used it in Australia, declaring the continent empty despite the presence of Aboriginal peoples who had lived there for sixty thousand years. That declaration wasn't overturned until Mabo v Queensland in nineteen ninety-two, when the Australian High Court recognized native title. Today, about fifty percent of Australia's land is subject to potential native title claims. So if you're buying what looks like empty land in Australia, you might be buying a legal battle.
About eighty percent of Canada's land is Crown Land — owned by the federal or provincial governments. But over six hundred First Nations have unresolved treaty claims. The government has a legal duty to consult Indigenous communities before transferring Crown Land to private interests. So that remote parcel in northern British Columbia that looks unowned? It's probably Crown Land, and it's probably subject to an unresolved claim. You can't just show up and buy it.
We've got three models. State ownership, where the government owns the land and leases it to you — Israel, China, the Crown Estate model. Private freehold, where you get something close to true ownership but the chain always traces back to a state grant — the US, Japan, most of Western Europe. And communal or customary ownership, where the land belongs to a community and your purchase might conflict with unwritten but legally recognized rights — much of Africa, parts of Australia and Canada. In none of these models does free land exist.
Here's the uncomfortable insight that the listener's question leads to. The "buy land and build" path isn't blocked by a single Israeli policy. It's blocked by the fundamental structure of how land ownership evolved globally. Every parcel has a chain. Every chain has a cost. The question isn't "is there free land?" — the question is "which ownership chain are you willing to enter, and what are the terms?
Let's talk about those terms. Because even in systems that look like freehold, there are ongoing costs that function like a perpetual rent.
Property tax is the obvious one. In the United States, property tax rates typically range from half a percent to two and a half percent of assessed value annually. That's not conceptually different from the ILA lease fee in Israel. You're paying a percentage of your property's value to the government every year, forever. Stop paying, and eventually the government takes your property. So even in a fee simple system, your ownership is conditional on ongoing payments to the state. The state is the silent partner in every property transaction.
The landlord who doesn't fix the plumbing.
And in Israel, the lease fee is explicit. It's a line item. In the US, it's called property tax and it funds schools and roads, so it feels different. But the economic effect is similar: a perpetual annual cost that scales with property value.
The listener in Israel, trying to figure out whether to buy an existing apartment or buy land and build, is really comparing two different entry points into the same system. With an existing apartment, the lease fee is baked into the price and the ongoing fees. With raw land and construction, you're paying the lease fee directly and visibly.
There's the conversion fee if you want to move from leasehold to freehold, which as we said averages three and a half percent and only applies in certain zones. Plus the annual lease fee of half a percent to one percent. Over a thirty-year mortgage, that's substantial. If you've got a property worth two million shekels, a one percent annual lease fee is twenty thousand shekels a year — that's over half a million shekels over thirty years. It's essentially a second, smaller mortgage that never gets paid off.
The "buy land and build" dream has a hidden price tag that most people don't calculate.
That's before we even get to construction costs, permits, infrastructure connections. But here's where I want to introduce a wrinkle that might actually be useful to the listener. There's a concept in property law called adverse possession. The idea is that if you occupy someone else's land openly, continuously, and without permission for a certain period — usually seven to twenty-one years depending on the jurisdiction — you can claim legal title to it. It's sometimes called squatter's rights, though that's a misleading term because the requirements are actually quite strict.
In theory, I could find an abandoned parcel, move in, and eventually own it?
In practice, adverse possession is almost impossible for residential use in any developed country. First, you need to identify land where the legal owner is truly absent and not paying attention. In most developed countries, property records are digitized and monitored. Second, your possession has to be "hostile" — meaning without permission — and "notorious" — meaning visible enough that the owner should have noticed. Third, you have to pay the property taxes during the possession period. Fourth, at the end of the period, you need a court order to quiet the title, and the original owner can show up and contest it. Fifth, even if you win, title insurance companies and banks are extremely reluctant to touch adverse possession titles. You'd struggle to get a mortgage or sell the property.
It's a legal curiosity, not a practical path.
There's one famous case that illustrates both the possibility and the absurdity. In the UK, a man named Harry Hallowes claimed adverse possession of a half-acre plot on Hampstead Heath in London. He'd lived there in a shack since the nineteen eighties. In two thousand seven, the land was valued at two million pounds, and a court awarded it to him. But he'd been living there for over twenty years, in one of the most surveilled cities on Earth, and the case took years to resolve. He died in twenty sixteen. It's not a strategy — it's a lottery ticket that takes two decades to scratch.
Adverse possession is the Bir Tawil of legal strategies. It technically exists, but good luck.
Let me pivot to something more practical. The listener asked whether any free land exists. The answer is no. But there are places where the cost of entry into the ownership chain is artificially low because of depopulation. Italy's one-euro house schemes are the most famous example. Towns like Sambuca and Mussomeli in Sicily have been selling abandoned houses for one euro, on the condition that you renovate them within three years. The renovation costs can run to tens of thousands of euros. You're not getting free land — you're getting subsidized entry into an existing ownership system in a town that's desperate for residents.
Japan's vacant house problem.
Japan has an estimated eight and a half million akiya — abandoned houses — across the country. The government runs akiya banks where you can browse vacant properties, and some rural prefectures offer substantial subsidies to buyers. In some cases, you can get a house for free or close to it, plus renovation grants. But again, you're buying an existing structure on land with a clear title chain. You're not homesteading. You're being paid to join a community that's shrinking.
The United States has versions of this too.
Several states and cities run remote worker relocation programs. Vermont will pay you up to seven thousand five hundred dollars to move there if you work remotely. West Virginia's Ascend program offers twelve thousand dollars plus outdoor recreation perks. Tulsa Remote in Oklahoma gives you ten thousand dollars and a co-working space membership. These aren't land grants — they're incentives to move to places with declining populations. You still have to buy or rent property at market rates. But the cost of entry is lower because demand is lower.
The actionable advice for someone who wants to escape the housing crisis by going the land-and-build route is: stop looking for unowned land, because it doesn't exist. Instead, look for depopulating areas where the ownership chain is cheap to enter, and accept that you're buying into a system, not escaping it.
That's the core takeaway. And I'd add three specific things listeners can do right now. First, if you're in Israel, understand the ILA lease terms on any parcel you're considering. The annual lease fee is a perpetual cost — calculate it over the life of your mortgage and compare it to the cost of buying an existing apartment where the fee is already priced in. Second, if you're outside Israel, check your local land registry for unregistered land. In the UK, about fifteen percent of land is still unregistered with HM Land Registry. That doesn't mean it's unowned — it means the owner hasn't filed the deed. You might be able to negotiate a discount from a seller who can't prove clean title, but you'll need a good solicitor because the legal risks are real.
Third, look at depopulation incentives. Italy's one-euro schemes, Japan's akiya banks, remote worker relocation programs in the US. These are the closest thing to "free land" that actually exists in twenty twenty-six, and they're all variations on the same theme: communities paying people to join them. The land isn't free, but the entry cost is subsidized to the point where it might as well be for someone with construction skills and patience.
Let me pull on a thread you mentioned earlier. The UK has fifteen percent unregistered land. That sounds like a lot. What does unregistered actually mean in practical terms?
It means the title hasn't been recorded in the central digital registry. Before the Land Registration Act of two thousand two, a lot of property transactions in England and Wales were done through old-fashioned deed systems — physical documents held by the owner or their solicitor. If the property hasn't been sold or mortgaged since the registry was created, it might still be unregistered. The owner still owns it. They have the deeds. But proving ownership is more complicated, and selling unregistered land requires a first registration process that can take months.
It's not a loophole. It's just bureaucracy lag.
It's bureaucracy lag that can occasionally create opportunities. If you find unregistered land and the owner is motivated to sell, you might get a discount because the transaction is more complex. But you're not discovering unowned land. You're discovering land where the paperwork is in a shoebox instead of a database.
I want to go back to something you said about China, because I think it's the most extreme counterpoint to the American model and worth understanding. No private land ownership at all.
Article Ten of the Chinese Constitution is unambiguous: urban land belongs to the state, rural land belongs to village collectives. When you "buy" an apartment in China, you're buying a seventy-year land-use right. The structure is yours, but the ground under it is not. When those seventy years expire — and the first batch of post-reform leases started expiring around twenty twenty — the government has the option to renew, renegotiate, or reclaim. So far they've been renewing, but there's no guarantee. You're essentially a tenant with a very long lease and strong political expectations of renewal.
Yet China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world.
About ninety percent, depending on how you measure it. But "ownership" in China means something completely different than it does in the US. It's ownership of a structure and a time-limited right to use the land. It's a cultural and legal distinction that most Westerners don't grasp. And it's not that different from Israel's leasehold system, except that Israel at least offers a path to freehold conversion in some cases. China doesn't.
The global spectrum runs from China's pure state ownership to Japan's near-pure private freehold, with Israel somewhere in the middle as a state-ownership system with a conversion valve. And in every case, the state is the ultimate backstop.
That's the philosophical question lurking under the listener's practical one. If all land traces back to a state claim, a colonial grant, or a conquest, then what does private property actually mean? It means we've all agreed to a legal fiction: that the piece of paper in the registry office represents genuine ownership, even though the chain always terminates at a government that took the land from someone else, or simply declared itself the owner.
We're all tenants of history.
That's the line. I'm writing that down. But it's not just a philosophical point — it has practical implications. If you understand that all land ownership is a legal construct backed by state power, you start evaluating properties differently. You stop asking "do I own this?" and start asking "what are the terms of my ownership, who can change those terms, and what happens if they do?
Which brings us back to the Israeli listener, staring at an ILA lease and trying to decide whether to sign. The terms matter more than the label.
The label — freehold, leasehold, fee simple — is less important than the specifics. What's the annual cost? What are the renewal terms? What restrictions exist on transfer or inheritance? Can the terms be changed unilaterally? In Israel, the ILA lease is actually quite stable — the government isn't going to revoke residential leases arbitrarily. But the annual fee is real money, and the conversion option is limited. You need to model those costs.
Let's talk about one more angle before we wrap the practical section. The listener mentioned savings erosion from renting. That's the core frustration — you're paying someone else's mortgage while trying to save for your own down payment, and the math keeps getting worse as prices rise.
Israel's housing prices are up eighteen percent year over year as of twenty twenty-six. If you're saving for a thirty percent down payment on a two million shekel apartment, you need six hundred thousand shekels. While you're saving, the target is moving. If the apartment appreciates eighteen percent in a year, your down payment target just went up by over a hundred thousand shekels. You're running up a down escalator.
The "buy land and build" alternative looks attractive not because land is cheap, but because the math on existing housing is so punishing. It's a flight to any alternative.
That's why understanding the land ownership system matters. If you're going to flee the apartment market, you need to know what you're fleeing into. Buying ILA leasehold land and building means you're still paying the annual lease fee. You're still subject to ILA approvals on your building plans. You're still in the system. The escape is partial at best.
The escape is partial, but the terms might be better. If you can buy land for less than the premium on an existing apartment, and build for less than the developer's markup, you might come out ahead even with the lease fee. It's not an escape from the system — it's a different entry point.
That's the real takeaway from this whole investigation. Stop looking for "unowned" land. It doesn't exist. Bir Tawil is a desert with no water and no recognition. Antarctica is frozen and treaty-locked. The high seas are lawless. Every habitable parcel on Earth has an owner, and that owner's claim traces back to a state, a conquest, or a colonial grant. The question isn't "is there free land?" The question is "which ownership chain can I afford to enter, and what are the ongoing costs?
After all that, the picture is clear: there's no free land. But there are smarter ways to enter the ownership chain. Here's what you can actually do. First, understand your local system. In Israel, that means the ILA and its lease terms. In the US, it means property tax rates and zoning laws. In the UK, it means the Land Registry and the distinction between freehold and leasehold. Second, evaluate the total cost of entry, not just the purchase price. The annual lease fee, the property tax, the maintenance, the infrastructure connections — these are part of the price. Third, look at depopulation incentives as a way to reduce the entry cost. They're not free land, but they're the closest thing available.
Fourth — this is the one I want listeners to really internalize — check the ownership chain. Not just the current owner, but the history. In Israel, that means understanding whether the parcel is ILA land, JNF land, or private freehold from the Ottoman period. In the US, it means a title search. In the UK, it means checking the Land Registry and understanding what's registered and what isn't. The chain tells you what you're really buying.
If the chain is murky, walk away. The discount isn't worth the legal risk.
Unless you're Harry Hallowes and you're willing to live in a shack on Hampstead Heath for twenty years. But I don't recommend that strategy.
So if all land is owned, and the chain always terminates at a state or colonial grant, maybe the real question isn't about land at all. It's about who gets to be in the chain.
That's where I wanted to end up. The housing crisis isn't just about prices. It's about the fundamental structure of who gets to participate in land ownership at all. When the down payment is thirty percent and prices are rising eighteen percent a year, the system is filtering out everyone who doesn't have family wealth or extraordinary income. The "buy land and build" dream is a response to that filtering — an attempt to find a side door. But the side door still has a bouncer.
The bouncer is history. Centuries of it. Ottoman tax records, British colonial borders, Homestead Act claims, Crown grants, native title decisions. Every parcel has a story, and every story has someone who got there first and someone who got excluded.
Which leads to an open question I've been turning over. With climate change affecting coastal property values and desertification expanding, we're going to see more land abandonment. More akiya situations. More depopulating rural areas. Governments will respond with more incentive programs to reabsorb those parcels. That creates new entry points — but also new forms of state control over who gets to live where. The ownership chain isn't static. It's being renegotiated constantly.
The housing crisis of twenty twenty-six is really a crisis of chain access. Who gets to attach themselves to a title history, and on what terms? The listener who sent this prompt is trying to find a link in the chain that doesn't cost a fortune. That's not unreasonable. It's just harder than the myth of free land suggests.
The myth is persistent for a reason. It's appealing. The idea that you can opt out of the system entirely, find a patch of land nobody wants, and build your own life — that's a powerful story. It's just not true. What's true is that you can make smarter choices within the system if you understand how it works.
To the listener: the bad news is, there's no free land. The good news is, understanding the ownership chain is itself a form of power. You can't escape the system, but you can navigate it with your eyes open.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In eighteen fifteen, a Danish linguist named Rasmus Rask traveled to Iceland and discovered that the elaborate Korean speech-level system — which includes seven distinct honorific levels — was being preserved in manuscript form by Icelandic scholars who had never met a Korean person. The manuscripts, acquired through Dutch traders, contained the only complete record of certain speech levels that were already falling out of use in Korea itself. Icelandic archivists maintained them for over a century before Korean linguists rediscovered the collection in nineteen twenty-seven.
Iceland saved Korean honorifics. Without ever hearing them spoken.
That's either deeply moving or deeply strange and I cannot decide which.
This has been My Weird Prompts. We're produced by Hilbert Flumingtop. If you have a weird prompt about land, ownership, or the housing crisis — or anything else — send it to prompts at myweirdprompts dot com. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com for every episode. We'll be back soon.
