The federal government owns the most land in the United States. It holds 640 million acres of mountains, fields and streams, all in the name of the American public. But slowly, over the past 10 years, the nation’s wealthiest private landowners have started buying up tracts of the countryside, according to data compiled by the Land Report and reported on by The Washington Post. In 2007, the report says, the nation’s 100 largest private landowners owned a combined 27 million acres of land. That amount is roughly equivalent to Maine and New Hampshire combined. But now, a decade later, the 100 largest landowners own 40.2 million acres, an increase of nearly 50 percent. This makes the amount roughly equivalent to the entirely of New England, minus Vermont. This represents the “the growing appeal of land as an asset class,” said Eric O’Keefe, editor of the Land Report, to The Post. Unlike stocks on Wall Street, land isn’t going anywhere, and the property can be used in a myriad of ways. According to a recent working paper by New York University economist Edward Wolff, land ownership is tightly concentrated among the upper class. The wealthiest 1 percent of households own 40 percent of the nation’s non-home real estate. The next 9 percent of households owned another 42 percent.
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