Yo more than the homesteading of federal western lands, we\u2019re gonna eventually need a land reform to redistribute the water rights in the \u201cprior appropriation\u201d jurisdictions west of the Rockies\n
\nIt\u2019d be a good first step if we could recognize both as \u201cland reform\u201d though. On top of all the homesteadings, the US did \u201corthodox\u201d, defeudalizing land reform at least once, in Hawaii in the 1960-90s IIRC, that\u2019s a precedent.\n
\nCalifornia itself was owned by two parafeudal land regimes, the original Spanish land grants and the later robber barons, tbh I\u2019m not sure how that shook out. I don\u2019t think there was ever a single monolithic \u201cland reform\u201d, more chipped away by gradual real estate and tax subtleties and dilution through inheritance. I know if you take the PCH up the coast, you run into a few necklace chains of small state parks, fertile valleys the barons owned to feed San Francisco by coastal shipping and then later gave up in lieu of taxes. I also know part was never reformed away, the master-planned towns of Irvine and Valencia were carved from intact monolithic holdings.\n
\nThen there\u2019s reservation land (and the structures for dividing and distributing it, and the parastructures by which speculators reconsolidated it, and the paraparastructures resisting them), what else? Florida! I think that might\u2019ve been under Spanish land grants, I know in the 20th century developers got huge tracts of land to subdivide. I saw a good longform about this recently, started with the author\u2019s parents honeymooning on Miami Beach and getting bussed 4 hours to hear a sales pitch, someone point me. \u201cWorthless Florida swamp lots\u201d was a trope in the mid-20th century, they were the eponymous plot devices of Glengarry Glen Ross and I remember catching a few references on TV back before UPN and the WB, when the un-networked higher-number UHF channels would run old Looney Toons.
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