One Thousand Ways to Make Money by Page Fox

is $3,000,000,000 lies another property worth literally nothing. Step over from Manhattan Island, where every foot of land needs to be overlaid with silver round-moons for its purchase, to New Jersey, and you will find 27,000 acres of marsh lying under the very nose of the metropolis--land hardly worth a song. Why is this? Simply because capitalists have not been wise enough to improve this great waste. In Holland, by a system of diking, land in a similar condition is now covered by great warehouses and factories, and cannot be bought for hundreds of millions of dollars. Here is the opportunity for capitalists. Why invest money in far-off gold fields when you have a Klondike here at the very threshold of the metropolis? “The first step,” says the State geologist, “is to build an embankment and a pumping station. The cost will be about $1,000,000. The main ditches should be made, and the whole area laid out in twenty-acre farms, and sold on the express condition that each plot shall be immediately ditched and brought under cultivation.” If we put the cost of ditching, and of other incidental expenses at $500,000, we have a total cost of $1,500,000. Then, if we estimate the worth of the land at only one-fourth the average price of land on Manhattan Island--which is the average worth of land in Jersey City--we have a value for the total 27,000 acres of $50,000,000. Profits, $48,500,000.