As a land owner you should be much more worried about state and local laws than what goes on at the fed.
There are millions of Americans who own what would otherwise be "developable and valued as such" land that became basically worthless with the state passage of various environmental laws (particularly wetlands setback stuff) that make the juice not worth the squeeze except if the location were to become "major urban area" level dense while the municipalities passed zoning laws making it all but impossible for that to ever happen.
I guess when you think about it it's not that the land is less valuable. It's that there's no value left after doing what you'd need (endless engineering and construction hoops, lawyers, court, etc) to extract the value without the government just unilaterally deciding you no longer own the land and backing that up with violence.
I find Illinois taxes to be scarier for land than other investments.
Illinois state is in a bad financial position, they can't inflate their way out of it. Financial assets are easier to move than land if things get bad.
Land value can decrease in real terms at the same time inflation is happening, sure. But it isn’t revalued by inflation in the way that a contract denominated in the inflationary currency is.
You buy land at time t for price x. You sell land at time t+1 for price y. If (y-x)/x is is less than the same calculation for whatever other asset you would have bought (I would use sp500), then you lost money.
I didn’t say that land was as good as the s&p at appreciating in value. That is a completely different claim which I wouldn’t assert. S&P has appreciated considerably more than inflation, right? So saying that something does or doesn’t track inflation is completely different from whether you lost money compared to if you’d instead gone with the s&p.
