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by floatrock 15 days ago
Lets be armchair evil for a sec...

What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?

And are we talking literally land, or would condo ownership suffice? (After all, you typically stack a few condos on top of one parcel of land). The smallest condo is probably dictated by some pesky human habitability rules, but what class of property has the fewest minimum-square-footage zoning rules? Retail probably has egress rules, but what about industrial spaces?

Could you create an industrial park to house a bunch of, to use a rough metaphor, independently-owned/independently-operated phone booths (or whatever other "qualifying use")?

Basically is there a category of land-use you could split ownership off at ridiculous scale, offer LLC-as-a-service to buy a bunch of them, and just for fun, tokenize the votes to provably aggregate the absentee ballots at scale via blockchain?

If it's one-entity-one-vote, what is the most cost-effective way to maximize the number of qualifying entities?

Bonus points for every order of magnitude of synthetic votes you can reasonably achieve over the fleshy variety.

3 comments

In most areas, especially any that are at all developed, land parcels and minimum lot sizes are under the control of a county or city commission, council, board, etc. Subdividing a property is as expensive and time consuming as you might imagine dealing with the government, you'll probably need a lawyer to do it properly, have to appear before at at least one if not several public meetings or hearings, etc. And they will almost certainly deny any petition along the lines of the examples you offered.

Where I am, things like dividing a 5 acre rural property so that a mother-in-law can live in a cottage near her family are routinely denied.

You mean under the control of the commissions, councils, boards, etc that are being elected in these very elections? Elections in which many actual humans may not be paying attention to positions on "arcane" land use rules, but the non-human legal entities in question (or their managers) will be?
>under the control of the commissions, councils, boards, etc

Let me save you some words.

Next time just call them "the local real estate developer slime balls" because that's who makes up the vase majority of these organizations. Like maybe a particularly upstanding town might have a local banker or lawyer on one of the boards or something.

These are not democratic institutions. They are business groups that happen to be part of government.

These organizations are already in the pocket of business interests. If anything this change is destabilizing because it now means that the PE owned car-wash and the company that owns a bunch of chain franchise businesses in the town as well as every local business that owns land or the landlords thereof but is owned by people who live in the surrounding towns can push back and say "screw you, we're not all willing to bend over and take it so you can make another buck developing another street of McMansions".

Letting megacorps vote is probably bad. But I think we should see where this goes. There's a lot of "enemy of my enemy" potential here for the currently disenfrachinsed business interests to push back on the business interests that are in bed with government to the benifit of the people. Enemy of my enemy is my ally and all that.

I read this as basically an attempt to run around the rotton borough mitigations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs

> What is the smallest subplot you can split a parcel into?

An acre, here. See your local zoning code or land statutes for minimum lot sizes. Consult agreements that run with the land for additional restrictions.