Security from future extremist attacks in the United States has centralized governance, reallocated welfare priorities, reduced standard civil rights, and redesigned spatial management for efficient civilian protection. Are property rights going to follow civil rights, transforming institutional relations long viewed as bedrock American values, entitlements, and identifiers and what would the social impacts of such change in property rights be in rural America?

During times of war, our government has taken extraordinary measures to protect the nation, including the expropriation of private property. We are at war and there is virtually no critical attention being paid to related changes in and reductions to property rights in land. Any citizen associating inalienable property with American values will want to understand the new "alienization" of property occuring in the name of national security and intelligently evaluate the trade-off.

With collaborators, we have surveyed New Yorkers on their plans to relocate in the event of new extremist attacks, investigated the state of readiness of local land use officials to handle in-migrant waves from threatened cities, and looked at the history of American changes in property rights in previous episodes of war and threatened national security.

We have documented changes in property ownership, value, and ownership characteristics in Ulster County, New York, before and after 9/11 as a pilot study within a larger study of New York City`s metropolitan counties to follow.