It takes a lot of money to buy a piece of property these days. But it’s not only the price of land that property buyers have to pay.
In the desert regions of Southern California, like Yucca Valley, land owners are grumbling about the added cost of having to pay the state government for the removal of Joshua trees when developing their property.
One owner, Alec Mackie, balked at the $32,961 being charged by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for the permits to remove 63 Joshua trees so he could build a home, the Hanford Sentinel reports.
The payment is required under the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act enacted in 2022. Even picking up fallen branches of the tree requires a permit, according to Hanford Sentinel.
Other homeowners within two miles of Joshua Tree National Park also face steep fees for performing work needed to connect to new sewer lines.
Some landowners, including Mackie, are considering moving to where there are no Joshua trees.
Meanwhile, 20-year-old Briton Daniel Jackson is living in exile in Dover, England after being evicted from a small strip of uninhabited forest on the border between Croatia and Serbia, more than 1,000 miles away, NBC News reports.
“October 2023 is when we started a settlement, and a few days later Croatian authorities destroyed that settlement,” Jackson said, recalling how he was evicted and banned from the place he called Verdis, according to NBC News.
Jackson formally calls it the Free Republic of Verdis and claims to have founded it in 2019 to be a hub for humanitarian organizations. He also claims to be the rightful owner and ruler of the neutral microstate roughly the size of the Vatican.
For now, Verdis is accessible only through its website, where prospective settlers can get virtual citizenship.
According to Jackson, 15,000 people have applied for citizenship so far, and 400 have already received physical passports and IDs.