This Land Is Your Land? This Land Is My Land.
The American Revolution began as a land grab. Our politics still revolve around the same hunger.
IT MIGHT NOT LOOK THE WAY we might imagine it, but Americans today are clashing over land with a ferocity the Founding generation would have recognized. Cities are locked in bitter battles over who can build housing where. Tech companies are racing to secure vast tracts for data centers and transmission lines. Farmers and Native nations are fighting utility-scale solar projects that would transform their land beyond recognition. And in Washington, D.C., Donald Trump speaks openly about acquiring Greenland, absorbing Canada, and redeveloping Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline. Trump still thinks about politics like a developer.
Two and a half centuries after the American Revolution, the central battles of our politics still revolve around that deeply American question: Who gets access to land, and for what purpose? Fights over land use and control can and have overthrown entire political orders. In critical respects, the future of American politics will depend on how policymakers—from local communities all the way up to international summits—manage the demand for land.
Fights over land—often bloody ones—have shaped the American story in fundamental ways. When Great Britain defeated France in the Seven Years’ War (known in British North America as the French and Indian War), it issued a land proclamation that would help spark the American Revolution. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 barred colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains and reserved much of that territory for Native nations. The British aim was pragmatic: avoid expensive frontier wars. But it stymied colonists, who saw western land as their path to independence, and foreclosed the ambitions of wealthy land speculators—many of whom would become leading revolutionaries and Founding Fathers—from snapping up frontier land for profitable development and resale to the growing ranks of land-hungry settlers. Twenty years later, as grievances over land and liberty fused, revolutionaries won the struggle over who would control and profit from North American land, founding a nation committed to expansion rooted in the ownership and use of land.
Converting land into opportunity has often driven American prosperity. For settlers arriving in colonial America from Europe, land promised what they had often been denied in their homelands: independence, freedom, and wealth. A family with land could grow its own food, build a home, and pass on property to the next generation. For colonial elites, land was a speculative asset that could be surveyed, bought cheaply, and sold at enormous profit to incoming settlers. The prosperity that flowed from land helped fuel both immigration and expansion, which quickly extended over the Appalachians into the Midwest following American independence.
If the notion of land as opportunity was important in the Revolutionary and Early Republican periods, it became the central organizing principle of nineteenth-century America, crystalized in 1845 in the concept of Manifest Destiny—the expansion of the United States over the entire North American continent. From the Northwest Ordinance to the Louisiana Purchase and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican–American War, massive land acquisitions quickly gave way to waves of settlement and the forced removal of Native peoples from their homelands. The 1862 Homestead Act turned this vision into a systematic process by granting 160 acres of public land to settlers willing to live on and improve it. For millions of Americans and immigrants, land ownership offered a path to independence and upward mobility. Access and ambition in turn accelerated American agricultural production and railroad development.
AMERICA’S WESTWARD EXPANSION contained a bitter and enduring irony: the economic promise of land often rests on another’s loss. Manifest Destiny was a white man’s ideology, and as was (and remains) the case in many settler-colonial states, settler demand for land that belonged to indigenous peoples or rival empires regularly led to violence, and it often encouraged the federal government to intervene on behalf of settlers whose incursions often provoked bloodshed.
The thirst for land hasn’t always been on the frontier. During the Industrial Revolution, which drew millions of Americans into crowded cities, a new form of land use premised on living close to urban opportunities—and to neighbors—became the engine of American technological and economic progress. In the twentieth century, suburbanization translated open land into mass opportunity, though primarily for whites. Developers turned farmland into subdivisions, and federally backed mortgages made homeownership attainable for millions of middle-class families. A single-family home on a private lot—the “little boxes made of ticky-tacky” or, more generously, the white-picket fence—became the quintessential American asset. It was a place to live, a source of wealth, and a pathway to upward mobility all at once. Highways, zoning laws, and cheap land enabled families to convert space into security and prosperity in much the same way earlier generations had done on the frontier. As with westward expansion, however, suburbanization spread prosperity unevenly: Black Americans and other minorities were routinely sidelined from access to opportunity. Urban segregation and red-lining seeded later race riots and urban decay.
Today, when so much of our lives are online, it may seem as though struggles over land are something consigned to history. Yet, barely below the surface, conflict over land and its use remains fundamental to our politics—perhaps now more than in recent years. There are three major, land-related fault lines running through our society and politics: housing, artificial intelligence, and expansionism.
THE MOST IMMEDIATE LAND CRISIS playing out in American life today is in housing. The United States is short millions of homes—estimates range between 3 and 5 million units—and at the root of that shortage is a struggle over who controls land and what can be built on it. Exclusionary zoning laws now function as a kind of new, hyperlocal Proclamation Line. Whatever their original intent, they privilege the status quo in vast tracts of urban and suburban land and propel those who bought or inherited at the right time to wealth while blocking access for outsiders. The asset that has so often been a pathway to democratic opportunity is now a key mechanism in its restriction.
Hunger for land and control of local space is also at the root of growing battles over the future of technology. Building the infrastructure for artificial intelligence—the data centers and transmission lines that the digital economy requires—demands enormous quantities of well-sourced land, water, and power. Green energy infrastructure also hinges on reimagining land use: the land requirements of utility-scale solar and wind projects rival those of the railroads in the nineteenth century. As with every previous era of American land development, communities that stand in the path of this build-out, whether farmers, outdoor enthusiasts, Native nations, or environmental activists, are discovering that the promise of progress comes with the threat of dispossession. The permitting battles and community protests erupting across the country reflect conflicting interests and visions of land use in the AI age that will likely intensify in the coming years, unless policymakers open space and opportunity for those who feel like they don’t have a voice in what is happening around them.
Historically, a closed or cramped frontier has often radicalized politics at home and spurred territorial ambition abroad. Think of the settlers who pushed past the Proclamation Line in the eighteenth century, or the culture-wide “crisis of masculinity” and imperial adventurism that followed concerns over the closing of the American frontier in the 1890s.
Today’s land crunch is already reshaping American politics in ways that echo earlier eras of land-driven upheaval. The frozen housing market and exclusionary zoning have become engines of a new insurgent politics. The YIMBY movement, the strengthening progressive wing of the Democratic party, and the MAGA coalition share little in ideology (and, in fact, are often in deep opposition), but all draw energy from communities—rural and urban, white and minority—that feel locked out of the upward mobility that land ownership once reliably delivered. Whether that pressure finds a reformist outlet or a more disruptive one will become a defining political question of the coming decade. While more permissive zoning rules and a federal homeownership push are conceivable, so is intergenerational tension, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and the proliferation of squatting, homelessness, and tenant organizing.
As we look abroad, an older dynamic is stirring. The Trump administration’s expressed desire to acquire Greenland, absorb Canada, and assert control over the Panama Canal and Gaza marks a return to the ambitions of frontier expansion that the Founding generation would have recognized immediately—as would Theodore Roosevelt and other Progressive-era imperialists. Some of the places have changed, but the ideas are much the same: land contains resources and opportunity, which confer power, and a place to demonstrate American and individual might. Greenland’s rare earth minerals and strategic position along future Arctic shipping routes make Trump perceive it as his opportunity for a new Louisiana Purchase so that, as he put it in his second inaugural address, the “United States will once again consider itself a growing nation—one that increases our wealth [and] expands our territory.” The president has even spoken of Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline in the language of real estate.
This outward projection has its own logic. When not constrained by a rules-based global order, the likes of which Trump has shirked, American ambition has historically turned imperial when domestic frontiers become settled and developed. That tendency repeated itself from the Revolution, and the growth of the United States as a continental nation, to the construction of an overseas empire in the early 1900s. In this sense, Trump’s territorial ambitions toward Greenland, Canada, and Gaza are not aberrations but part of a longer trend of expansionist foreign policy in the United States. As a property mogul, Trump approaches land expansion with a grasping greediness. But climate change will only heighten land-grab temptations for a new generation of American leaders, especially on the right, as sparsely populated lands with weak sovereignty in the far north gain strategic and productive value, and as parts of the United States, from the Southwest to coastal Florida, suffer from heat, drought, and rising seas.
American ambition has always been most pointedly expressed in land. The Founders took up arms partly over the right to seize and profit from land. We ignore their descendants, land-hungry and unsettled both at home and abroad, at our peril.
Michael Albertus is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (Basic Books, 2025). He writes the newsletter The Good Society.
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