Show HN: Unfenced – Land for sale that borders public land
unfenced.landHow it works, once a week:
1. About 700,000 active U.S. listings come in from a licensed listings API.
2. Each listing near public land gets its county parcel boundary, from state and county GIS services where they publish them and from a licensed parcel provider elsewhere. With no boundary, the page says so and measures from the listing point, but never claims a shared edge.
3. Public land is USGS PAD-US 4.1, narrowed to land an agency actually owns (Category = Fee, so no conservation easements), that's open to the public, and that's at least 50 acres.
4. Parcel and public land are compared in a local metric projection (shapely/geopandas): within (an inholding), bordering (the boundaries touch, and the shared edge is measured in feet), or adjacent (within 75 m, about a road's width).
Each property also gets the size of the connected public land behind it, its elevation (USGS 3DEP), road access (Census TIGER roads), FEMA flood zone and Forest Service wildfire hazard. The output is about 16,000 static pages with Leaflet maps on Cloudflare Pages, rebuilt every Monday on a Mac mini. ZIP search looks the ZIP up in your browser from Census centroids, so nothing you type is sent anywhere.
Things that were harder than expected:
- Lot sizes sometimes arrive in square feet in the acres field. A Birmingham, AL listing came through at 7,000 acres. Sizes are now checked against price, property type and the parcel itself, and corrected or withheld with a note.
- Condo and subdivision listings often resolve to the association's common tract, so a single town lot can appear to share miles of boundary. Those are flagged as shared parcels.
- PAD-US stores some units as one multipart polygon. My first "connected public land" figure for one Montana property was 69.7 million acres, about three-quarters of the state. Units are now split into pieces and joined only where they actually touch.
- Road centerlines and lot lines come from different agencies and are often tens of meters apart, so "does a road touch this parcel" needs a tolerance, and frontage only counts where the boundary runs along the road.
It's free, with no account and no cookies. There are free weekly email alerts for any search, starting Monday. I'd especially like to hear from anyone who has bought rural land: what should it measure that it doesn't?
What API is that? It looks like you or the data broker are violating some NAR / MLS / State Compliance rules to me. You might want to look into those.
https://www.rentcast.io/terms-api
> You and We acknowledge and agree that, in the event of a third-party claim arising out of or relating to your access to or use of the RentCast API, or your possession, use, disclosure, display, resale, or distribution of the API Data, including any claim that such activities infringe any third-party’s intellectual property rights or do not comply with applicable laws and/or regulations, you, and not Us, will be responsible for the investigation, defense, settlement, and discharge of any such claim. You will promptly notify Us in writing of any such claim.
How do you handle listings that go off-market between weekly rebuilds? Do those pages 404, redirect, or stay up as sold? I run a few sites built on weekly public data and still haven't settled on what works best with Google when pages disappear.
Really curious about your data sources. Where are you getting all this stuff?
- Listings: RentCast's API (licensed), pulled weekly.
- Parcel boundaries: state and county GIS services where they publish statewide parcels (about 20 states), and Realie (licensed) for the rest.
- Public land: USGS PAD-US 4.1, filtered to fee-owned, open-access land of 50+ acres.
- Elevation: USGS 3DEP point queries. Roads: Census TIGER. Flood: FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. Wildfire: Forest Service Wildfire Hazard Potential (2023). ZIP search: Census ZCTA centroids.
The free state parcel services were the biggest hunt: every state publishes differently, and a couple that looked open turned out to be test or internal-use-only endpoints.
Sure, there's the ability to hike directly from your home, but I imagine you'll regularly have people wander on to your property. And if something illegal happens on your property by a different party, you might be liable.
Seems like the cons outweigh the pros. Or is there something I'm missing?
The people who've been most enthusiastic so far are hunters, homesteaders, off-grid folks, and people who want somewhere to walk out the back door and keep going, where the public land is the whole point. Others will see the same boundary as trespass risk, hunting pressure or a fence the state won't fix (see the comment above about a state park). Same fact, different buyer.
On liability, rules vary by state, so that's worth checking with a local attorney before buying, whatever the map says.
American Prairie in Montana is an example going the other way: a nonprofit buying private land that surround public land and opening them to the public. It's somewhat contentious locally, but it shows how much the private parcels around public land shape who can actually use it.
How does the typical suburban family look like? Did all 3-4-5 of you drive F150s there?
Other people deserve access to public land too but might not pass the vibe check of the private guards, which is what op was lamenting as well.
Land that borders public land doesn't have that problem on at least one side. That's also why the site shows which agency manages the land next door, since that affects how likely it is to stay as it is.
Well, that depends on how large and obvious your property is.
Assuming you have a typical suburban 1/2 acre or 1 acre property, the simplest thing to do is put up a fence, or otherwise make sure that there are no trails that go over the property you use.
Otherwise, you need some kind of bounds marking and obvious "no trespassing" signs.
FWIW: The site identified public lands near my house that have a lot of trails on it. There are trails that go right behind peoples' yards, and most of them either have fences or sheds that make it obvious where the bounds are.
I live next to a State Park. It sounded really cool when I bought the house. No neighbors! Privacy! There is a trail accessible from my properly that goes into some woods, which you only want to be in during the Fall / Spring because the ticks and chiggers are intense.
The biggest issue with sharing a border with the state is the fence line. Technically it's on them to maintain. The woods are filled with mostly 200 foot trees. They exist right up to my property and fall every year during big storms. There goes the fence line. I have dogs so the fence is important. Otherwise they run out into the woods that have licensed bow-hunting during the Winter.
In practice its impossible to get the fence fixed. You are working through layers of bureaucracy and mismanagement. There is no vested interest from a parks service to work well with hundreds of neighbors individually. I'd build fence lines myself, and could easily pay for it, but it's the upkeep of those fences that would be difficult because so many trees (really, it's every year) fall down from their side.
My main point is that sharing a properly line with the government is more like sharing a properly line with nobody. You may as well own that land. Don't expect any upkeep and go in with eyes open.
My experience has been the opposite, though it's a different situation: I bought recreational land in Pennsylvania that borders state game lands, and I don't live there full time. What I wanted was the ability to step off my own ground into something wild and mostly untouched, and it's been a very positive experience.
I think you've put your finger on the real point: it's a trade-off, and it depends on what you want from the land. Living next to it full time with dogs is a very different thing from a weekend place you go to so you can disappear into the woods. "Go in with eyes open" is good advice either way.
Honestly i do not know the full scope of this one, but if there's one thing I've learnt from observing her work over the last decade...it's humans need to stop adding chemicals to water bodies with the goal of thinking they're helping something.
It might well be safe, but the question is what are the downstream affects of reducing the population of mosquitos (or other bugs in the water that this substance impacts). Maybe they've exclusively positive, but I assure you determining that is no walk in the park.
"Mosquito dunks linked to declining bear population - farmers struggling with deer populations"
I don't know, what are the possible effects of antibiotics? What are the possible effects of uprooting weeds, which some organisms may depend on? What are the possible harmful effects of putting out wildfires?
For every action that someone might think of as beneficial, there are all sorts of "harmful" effects that can be posited. In the examples above, these harms are not even just theoretical, and yet people do not constantly wring their hands worrying about wildfire fighting, weed control, or the proper use of antibiotics.
That this seems to happen only with mosquitoes seems quite weird to me, especially when it occurs even with efforts to reduce mosquitoes that spread malaria and other diseases. People are oddly very worried about some nebulous harm caused by reducing real and serious harm now.
Wildfire - controlled wildfires are actually beneficial to prevent the real bad ones and help refertilize. So they now let them burn down if possible and just control the edges where necessary.
Weed control - poisoned groundwater from herbicides/pesticides is a huge headache, so these are tightly regulated on substances and amounts.
Antibiotics - multiresistant bacteria have taken over since years. In turn, antibiotics are now prescribed more rarely and for longer periods (to make it resistant survivors less likely) and new antibiotics had to be developed.
I can imagine her having some long explanation about the unknown risks of man spreading this substance, even if its not a chemical agent. I lean on the edge of listening to Grandpa Simpson on these kind of things: https://i.imgur.com/MdjduDH.png
It is not meaningful to allow every conceivable unknown unknown (to channel Rumsfeld) suck out any sense of agency.
Also massively illegal if you live anywhere that has a state level wetlands protection type law and the enforcement authority decides to exercise their discretion to make your life hell. They typically claim jurisdiction and authority over all activity in/around wetlands so theoretically you should be getting a state permit before digging a mailbox post hole or doing any sort of "management" of plants/animals but most of the time they just turn a blind eye to private homeowners who are being reasonable.
Wetlands laws and rules (non-criminal code generally, but wetlands are some of the worst) are written in a way to make RICO look like a meticulously scoped out piece of technical legislation.
Second, most states that regulate wetlands beyond the federal minimum adopt some sort of absurd expansive standard far above what the feds want. It's complex and varies by state. Sometimes there's a square footage minimum, sometimes there isn't. There's also "gotchas" where manmade areas can become wetlands if they are let to be that way too long, so like farmer Johnson can absolutely get screwed by his grandfather's bright idea to make all the drainage converge in one spot 40yr ago. Sometimes there are exemptions, sometimes not. There's huge variation by state and some states allow local governments to enforce rules above and beyond the state ones.
But yeah I don't mess with wetlands.
Agreed. I'm in South Texas where we have Aedes mosquitoes that are an invasive species and spread Malaria, Dengue, Zika, and other infections which kill people. I consider disrupting their lifecycle to be an unvarnished good. I carry mosquito dunks in my pocket when I go on walks and toss them into any puddles, drains, storm sewers, and ponds I encounter, and it seems to have helped a lot anecdotally. I care a lot about nature/ecology, but also fuck mosquitoes.
If you wouldn’t even pay for it yourself, as pretty much the sole beneficiary and someone who could afford it but would rather the money go elsewhere, why would it make sense for other taxpayers to pay for it?
Isn’t the premise of “you may as well own that land” the entire appeal of living next to public land anyway?
Which is a fine option, but it should be something agreed to by both parties. You can't just hand over a cost like that, and if you buy property with some kind of agreement this choice is baked into the original price. It makes perfect sense for the government to uphold agreements it has made.
Secondly - if they did own the fence line, it'd be on the government to come and fix it when one of their trees breaks it, surely?
There is no agreement whatsoever, that's the point. No agreement was made or mentioned. The mere existence of a fence on government property does not constitute an agreement to maintain said fence.
We're on the same page.
Can you imagine the sneering and hand wringing that would ensue in the comments if you tried to make such an argument about private property?
If a private landowner failed to maintain anything that was created by man (as opposed to nature) they'd say things like "public nuisance", "blighted", "antisocial" and all the other buzzword people of that bent love to use.
I don't really care what the standard is. If some standard is good enough to be worth legislating enforcing then it ought to apply equally to all land owners regardless of public or private.
Anyway tree law is super, super well-established and it works the same way for private parties. Your neighbor's trees are none of your business until they are on your property, and then they're exclusively your business (except you can't structurally damage or kill the tree e.g. by cutting roots that cross onto your property).
You clearly have some strange bone to pick. You should pick it elsewhere.
The key question is what is actually in the agreement. 'The state will maintain the fence' doesn't indicate the level of maintenance or the timeliness of said maintenance, it just means the neighbor isn't allowed to do it.
> Secondly - if they did own the fence line, it'd be on the government to come and fix it when one of their trees breaks it, surely?
From discussions I've seen, generally there's no legal responsibility for tree falls, unless there's neglegence like ignoring a clearly failing tree. But leaving a forest to do whatever the forest wants doesn't feel like neglegence.
My default presumption, without checking with them directly, is not only that it would not be allowed, but that this is also very much not a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" situation either. Even just asking the question can draw attention from them you may not want.
The ready accessibility of the land is advantageous in some ways, but as neighbors the state can be quite nasty. Your other neighbors don't tend to have anywhere near the regulatory firepower to make sure you comply with what they want.
How that works out in practice is basically you as the owner of the tree have to document it's healthy each year. Then, if it falls and you can prove it was healthy you're fine. Hopefully neighbors insurance pays. If you didn't document the health of the tree, your neighbor can press charges and you (or your insurance) have to pay.
Unless negligence is involve (like an arborist being hired to condemn a tree), they’re generally considered and act of god. They’re the responsibility of the property they fall onto.
So, in the case of OP, the situation is unfortunate, but it’s on him to maintain his properties and his fence lines within his properties. It’s convenient the state has a fence along part of his property, but it’s not their responsibility to fix it for adjacent lots.
Practically you’re right of course, but they are probably technically responsible given the circumstances the poster laid out.
It would boil down to their degree of plausible deniability, ‘state priviledge’, and the specifics of the law and precedent in their state of course.
Good luck
I maintain timberland, a percent of dead and diseased trees are normal. It is highly unlikely, at least in the species I’m familiar with, that a tree will just fall over.
Evolution tends to select against that kind of thing.
Notably, parks get sued pretty frequently when trees drop limbs on people or trees fall on folks stuff, under exactly this principle. It works too.
What they are noting is the State is it’s own beast, and good luck getting it to do what you want.
This also is not a city type situation, where the density and value of something makes certain types of situations play out differently.
In the city, if a neighbor’s diseased tree falls on your house, you might have a legitimate legal claim, depending on the circumstances.
Your homeowners insurance will figure that out.
If one of the million random trees on state property falls on your fence? It doesn’t much matter what the law says, good luck.
Depending on the size of the tree and your home you might have enough to sell to the neighbors too.
I'm assuming the state doesn't come around asking for payment for their fallen trees.
I also wouldn't expect the fence to hold up well if the yard had anything that would attract deer or bears.
Which is hardly the end of the world, but it can definitely grind the gears to be spending thousands when you could fix the problem for several hundreds, if not perhaps several tens, of dollars if they wouldn't be assholes about it. But I would absolutely advise anyone in that situation to spend the thousands and not bank on the state not being assholes about it.
I can also add that you can't even be sure that if you got away with it for years that you will continue to get away with it. The particular issue that my father got into a bit of hassle with the state about is that he accidentally put a pole barn across the state line. Didn't mean to, but he misread the survey markers. Fortunately, they let him remediate it at his expense without pursuing the matter any further legally... but it means they did, after several years of it being there, come through a with a survey team and verify that nobody on the border was crossing into their land, and anything they found they made the residents fix no matter how many years the deviation had been there. All the laws about such thing between two citizens mean nothing to the state.
Oh no. Tbe preposterous idea of putting a fence around your own property.
A sibling comment pointed this out, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105376
These properties only border public land on one side.
If someone is trying to fence their dogs into their property, it’s implied that they’re already fencing every other part of the property. They would be completing it with a back section.
Trying to maintain the state’s fence is not a good idea.
You would build your own fence on your side of the property set back by a couple feet.
Oh, the joys of living in a place with actual rule of law.
Here in my 3rd world country, people are free to annex land demarcated for streets that adjoin their property, without any real consequences, as long as it is not meant to be a major street.
Like my neighbors have a fence, I have a fence, there is like a 1' alley in between them, everything is on the respective owner's land, and that would definitely work even if your neighbor is the government.
If fence integrity is important, you need your own fence. Otherwise your fence is as good as your least interested neighbor.
It worked.
For some reason every bureaucracy is a host to a type of person that will go very far to make sure everything is in accordance with rules. If you draw attention to yourself they might want to check some ridiculous things that no sane person would ever actually pay attention to.
These are the ambitious bureaucrats and are probably the worst scum on earth. If you watched Andor you know who I am talking about. Not the lady but that security guy. This is the exact type.
Sure, most times you will not meet them but some totally amazing people.
But it’s enough to meet them once and your life could be ruined forever.
The power asymmetry is too strong to risk it.
I would rather act as if I was an outlaw and a guilty criminal with my dealings with government. Guilty, on all accounts. Now.. how to avoid the punishment?
That’s how we think about the government in Eastern Europe culturally. Whether that’s exotic or relatable to you as American, that will be interesting.
If you start actively managing it (removing invasive species, dead trees etc.) the state can take a more active interest at any time and sue/fine you into oblivion.
Or a serious pest issue (someone mentioned ticks, for instance).
Pros and cons of the situation, for sure.
It is common in parts of the US for government land to be illegally maintained by locals at their own expense because the government fails to do so. The impacted people aren't left with many other choices. There is little recourse when the government claims sole authority but also neglects its responsibilities under that authority.
This has been an issue in land management for as long as I've been alive. It sort of works to the extent the government is oddly incurious about someone else illegally doing their job for them. But every so often a bureaucrat with idle hands will decide to make an example of someone for illegal maintenance without addressing the underlying problem.
And if it’s your fence you can build one of the ones that’s cheap and easy to replace. I wouldn’t be shocked if you could put chain link back up after some straightening. You could use the downed tree to fix the fence if it was split log (not so good at keeping dogs in though)
If that bothers you, don’t buy property adjacent to 200ft tall trees. They will fall. That’s what trees do. They grow, then die and fall over.
Well, that might come true with that kind of attitude, but it doesn't seem to be a given certainly.
And humans, I hear they say these days, go back a million years...
It feels like the top commenter is simply sharing personal insight, not recriminating and pleading woe, so Idk why these responses act like they're being egregious. The situation simply requires cooperation with a government that apparently is loathe to go through the process with.
My presumption is the state does not regularly audit and trim high risk limbs or branches near the property line. Since the fence is owned by the state, they will not sue themselves in civil court for their own negligence.
Most people don't actually want to be at the edge of raw nature.
In what state? Last I knew, the State Parks in most US states were miserably underfunded - so quick fixes (for pretty much anything, not just fences) just ain't gonna happen.
And what's the legal status of the fallen trees? In a fair number of places a 200' tree, already down, might be kinda valuable.
When your neighbour isn't as invested as you in maintaining the border or has other annoyances you are better off leaving some buffer zone that allows to isolate yourself from the border and whatever road, river, canal, forest or loud or busy place is at the other side.
Is it the physical blockade that the fence provides or just "where is the boundary?" - my guess is that it's both. While physical fence is hard to sustain due to trees falling but could there be an electronic solution for keeping the boundary line intact by putting some sort of gadgets underground which you can always ping to see where is the boundary?
tree falls over onto your property, you fix the fence.
tree falls over and you clear it, illegal logging you get in trouble.
When I look for a parcel of land, I'm also interested in proximity to healthcare, groceries, airports (bad!), motor sports, shooting ranges; general steepness of the property particularly at the roadway (too steep makes the property unusable), topography in general (any flat spots to build a house?); availability of power; water features; bikability (checked by looking at Strava's heatmap); average number of days temperature > 85F; average number of days temperature < 30F. There's more but this list is long enough already.
If you had to pick the three that rule a parcel in or out fastest, which would they be? That'd help me decide what to build next.
Entirely AI-generated websites are whatever at this point but I'll be damned if I lose the fight against AI-generated HN comments. Especially on a Show HN...
Regardless, neat site. Couple things, first maybe a disclaimer on why you would want this on the home page? And on the state page itself I can't tell how bordering is different than adjacent. IMO just calling it "within 75m" would be better, and since this is for the US consider making it based on feet :p. Also, I would recommend that at least for user facing strings though you give it a little TLC and remove the really really obvious Claudisms
> official boundary maps, not listing descriptions.
> An analysis of publicly available boundary data — not a survey, and not a listing service
plus everything on the How It Works page is extremely obviously LLM.
On people crossing over: it depends a great deal on the land. Next to state game lands you'll see hunters in season; next to a big national forest you may rarely see anyone. It's very dependent on individual perspective and location.
Bordering vs adjacent: bordering means the parcel lines actually touch and there's a measured shared edge; adjacent means no shared edge but within about 250 ft (usually a road or a strip of other land in between). You're right that the state pages don't make that clear, and feet is the better unit for a US site. Tho most US geospatial data is published in metric lol.
And fair point on the copy. I run a small design studio and built this in my free time, I leaned on AI for a lot of the site text. The "Why this exists" section on How it works is my own story, but the rest deserves a pass in my own voice.
So that's why the site text reads as AI slop.
Were you ever seriously fooled?
I've found that living next to public land is an insanely undervalued luxury. There's very little I would trade it for.
If you're up for a chat, please ping me! This is pretty cool and I'm wondering if theres a collaboration, or if I can straight up use some of what you've made.
And like you said, hard to get anyone out to even fix it. We had to wait 6 months for the snowpack to thaw and scheduling to line up. So that meant an extra thousand or so bucks just to build a workaround system in the meantime.
At some point, I think electric VTOL aircraft will make economic sense. Companies like Vight Aero are working on two seaters with decent range and speed.[1] Then you'd just need an area the size of a tennis court to take off and land. You also wouldn't have to ship fuel in, as you could charge the aircraft with off-grid solar. If that happens, I could see a lot of people moving away from cities.
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye...
Also a concern is proximity to fracking and now data centers. Not sure how to see if neighbors sold their underground…
As an anecdote, my parent’s home, where I grew up, is a small plot along my town’s watershed property. When the price of lumber went up recently, the town council conveniently remembered that the watershed property was once a massive “tree farm,” and since has leveled all of the surrounding woods. We never expected this. It has been emotionally crushing.
Everyone then scrapes or subscribes to the MLS data. It's why you have a dozen identical realty sites: Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, Trulia, etc.
Most of the listings near me are for tens of acres and >$5 million
I had a browse around a few states like Indiana and North Carolina, and was able to find plenty of low cost lots, even large ones, but the general problem is that they are miles away from civilization and on tiny local roads that may become an issue in winter.
It'd be useful to filter by proximity to a larger city, or airport.
Very cool idea though - some amazing large lots with beautiful views if you don't mind being pretty isolated.
As somebody who is constantly looking for property adjacent to BLM this is a really good resource.
Edit: as of 1200ET the OP responding to me nicely is flagged/dead which is crazy. What is happening?
One big issue: not having a price and acreage range selectors means you see a lot of 0.2acre lots and $8mm parcels which I'm assuming most of us wouldn't be looking for
Surprisingly easy to manage, though. You'd think that things like propane delivery and septic system service would be hard to hire when you're miles out of town, up a steep logging trail, and across a home-made bridge, but the local businesses are used to it. I genuinely don't know how they find the place most of the time.
Small world.
I bought 20 acres bordering the national forest a couple years ago. The seller made sure I had some idea of what I was getting into. Due to the isolation and terrain, everything is more difficult. It's been a lot of work to build a road, level an area to build on, construct a shed, and set up off-grid solar power. But it's also very rewarding. The views are spectacular, and at night you can see the milky way. There's still a lot more work to do before it's worthy of being called a vacation spot, but I'm very happy with my decision.
1. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Snag-Mountain-Rd-110-Wash...
Thanks for sharing
Price per acre could suss out whether it's developed or in demand vs more rural (less price per acre).
Other than that, bravo! Great idea, well implemented!
a. Not for sale.
b. Wildly incorrectly priced, according to the Zestimate and most recent sold price, when sold recently. I mean, like, $59k vs $470k.
But this is still very cool.
The biggest downside is trees will absolutely murder the local infrastructure if a serious windstorm blows through. It's one thing to lose power, but it's something else to lose roads. I keep a battery powered chainsaw in my truck for emergencies.
The only other issue is that maintaining a garden can be difficult without aggressive access control. Deer will eat anything you haven't put in a cage. I don't bother trying to keep them out anymore. I'm convinced they jump the chain link fences at night when no one is watching.
The fact that the land is public has had zero negative effect. The local grid operator is the most frequent visitor by a long shot. I made the intentional tradeoff to have an electrical easement between my property and the forest. The grid operator has to keep the tree line maintained. In practice, it's mostly self-clearing. The trees have a hard time overwhelming the lines when they are energized.