incredible. even if out of date in some ways, geographic data dumps of ownership records like this can be analyzed to find incredible stories that owners are not interested in ever seeing light.

i used to work in a national sacrifice zone with probably the most purposely underdeveloped civic infrastructure i've ever seen, and there has been this hush-hush conversation among the give-a-fuck population about this past attempt to build a publicly accessible record of property ownership for the last 50+ years, because all the signs point to nobody local owning much of anything despite this enduring myth that the place is so backwards and broke because the people there are backwards and like it that way.

digression: nevermind that 100 years ago the people of that place came together to form one of the largest armed, and militant insurrections against capitalist exploitation and was brutally put down with chemical weapons and explosives dropped from the very first planes purchased by the US military. then everything was absolutely memory holed and a narrative was crafted that the people of that place were backwards and crazy. yee haw.

anyway, the story about the property records goes that some community group got some obscure federal support back in like the 1970s to put a comprehensive record of the region together as part of a plan to track where federal development dollars were actually going (because despite billions going in, seems like none of them ever stayed), and when some capital formations on the east coast found out they shut everything down. the legend says that it's still out there somewhere, as a hardcopy, and somebody's kid will find it in an attic and eventually dump it online.