Fractured public land is hidden in plain sight. In communities
across the country, a patchwork assortment of local governments
share splintered ownership over surplus public properties, which
can be found scattered in residential neighborhoods and alongside
highways, in the shadows of development projects and in the scars
of urban renewal. The ripple effect of this fragmentation extends
across the spectrum of local governance. It creates needless costs
and bureaucratic headaches at a time of acute fiscal distress for
cities and counties. It contributes to an inequitable imbalance of
local power between formal and informal landowners in a community.
And curiously, the operative legal regime enables the problem
while simultaneously muddying pragmatic ways to confront it.
This Article seeks to shed light upon the local land checkerboardand
in doing so, the cluttered and opaque world of local government
law that it inhabits