The Landowning 1%

“When you are looking at land, it is about ownership—you cannot do something with other people’s land,” said Pittsburgh landscape-architect Nina Chase, discussing a report prepared on West Virginia for the Architectural League’s Roundtable Project. “The figures are staggering,” Harvard PhD candidate and East Kentucky native Caroline Filice Smith followed up: 1 percent of owners hold almost half of the land, most of the landowners are outsiders, and things get worse when you go underground—thousands of small landowners and farmers have their mineral rights—which, with strip mining—can become land rights, owned by just a handful of government and private entities.