If I wanted to ensure that my land would never be used for a shopping mall or sports stadium, but I nevertheless wanted rid of the land, could I sell it in this almost ‘crowdfunded’ piecemeal manner and get my money, while also making the red tape involved in consolidating all of those 1-meter-squared chunks too costly to be worth doing?
Obviously no one would want a 1m piece of land, but maybe if they were doing it for activist reasons (like how the Cards Against Humanity people bought land to prevent Trump building his wall), or even as a novelty where they could buy it for their friend as a joke gift, it might be enticing. People could have annual parties where they go to their land and place a little deckchair on it and drink beers with their ‘neighbours’.
In much of the USA, the county-level is the administrator for deed recording and for land parceling. Municipalities (eg cities, towns) within the county may have their own zoning rules, and so the question can be divided in two:
Zoning laws can enforce minimum lot sizes. For example, an agricultural or business district might disallow plots smaller than 5 acre or 2000 sqft, respectively, because anything smaller would become economically infeasible for those purposes. A legitimate goal of zoning is to make land more economically productive, and plots that are oddly-shaped or impractically small would be counterproductive. The county and cities would also be concerned with tax revenue per area, which scales up with productivity of land (for whatever use is permitted in zoning). Note: I’m not a fan of American-style zoning, which has proven to be quite overburdening and frequently racist over the last 100 years.
But setting aside zoning, there’s also the matter of land administration. Subdividing a parcel into smaller lots is common, but since those small lots will take up ledger and deed records at the registrar’s office, that adds a non-insignificant cost per plot. Easily several hundred dollars per subdivision, as the process is normally meant for larger real estate transactions in preparation for development.
Land transaction costs in the USA are not uniform throughout the country, but they often amount to several thousands just to verify title to land. Part of the problem is that most states don’t keep an authoritative land registry that shows exactly who owns what. Instead, title insurance companies make money by assuring the title after a process that investigates the land’s title history. Here in California, that history often has to be traced back to Mexican land grants in the 1800s, which is kinda nuts just to sell a small home.
Sure, for a 1 sq meter plot – which no one should ever buy using a mortgage – the buyer might not need/want title insurance. But the lack of title provenance inflates purchase prices, simple because people do want to know that they’re actually buying something real and it’s not a worthless deed.
(as an aside, it’s entirely possible in California and other states to sell a deed for land you might own, but which the seller makes no guarantee that they do in fact own. It’s kinda like a fork in cryptocurrency, where if the fork is later rejected, then that part of the ledger history is entirely dead and you’re SOL. Again, we could really use a central land registry…)