We all rent the land on which we live. Try not paying your property taxes. In most states.

...except for Nevada when for a few years they briefly allowed people to get allodial title.

...that expired upon death and could not be passed to heirs.

to me this looks fair: land does not reproduce, but people do. Give people the right to own a non infinite resource forever and pretty soon you get to the point where 1% of them will own 99% of that resource, which is exactly what is happening now in many contexts.

Still pretty cool.

thats almost a worldwide exception

I hear Mexico allows you to actually own land.

I don't know if this counts or not, but in the UK there are the concepts of freehold and leasehold. Leasehold requires payment of rent on land (to a landlord), but freehold does not. I believe that technically all land is owned by the crown, but I don't think they tax based on land ownership.

With land, it at least makes sense, because there's a very limited supply of it. So one could reasonably argue that it's just too valuable for society to fully surrender all control of even a part of it on a permanent basis.

In CA they just put a lien on your house. And all that means is you can't sell without clearing the lien (by paying back). I didn't pay property taxes for 2 years once.

That will happen in most states, but if you don't pay long enough they will usually come after you. It may take several years.

But you can also can rent land on which to farm, to build a factory, or a skyscraper, without living on that land.

I read the linked wikipedia article, but there was nothing in it that I found to support your assertion the freed slaves were not allowed to own land?