That explains a lot. As it is, lawyers are the source of the problems with regulatory government, making oodles of bucks selling protection rackets through NGOs. Lawyers get brainwashed too, in fact, they are screened for their predisposition to Statist solutions via the LSAT.
There are practical problems with your proposal, however.
Let's see if you understand "my proposal"...
Assuming a permanent restriction,
...and the first thing you do is set up an un-necessarily restrictive case. You are correct that covenants are exchanged all the time, but that they do not respect changes in valuation. I don't recommend such, but advocate term contracts for services.
As for price, you are forgetting all the other uses of property coincident with selling a viewing contract: habitat, hunting, fuel and watershed management... every one of which is currently the exclusive province of regulatory government. Products, services, responsibilities, and risks that have effectively been socialized by regulatory government.
If the Viewee's land can't be used because of the restrictive covenant, the Viewee's land is no longer an asset but has become a liability (the Viewee must continue to pay taxes on the land).
See above. Further, as I have said elsewhere on this thread, property taxes are, IMO, unconstitutional and have no place in the equation. However, even allowing them from the public good perspective, it beats an open space district or an easement, the "practical problems" of which are legion because they too often involve corruption on behalf of developers.
That raises a question on the other side of the equation. If the purchase price for the restrictive covenant is same as the purchase price for the land (the land's fair market value), why would the Viewer buy only a restrictive covenant and not the full fee simple absolute (full ownership of the property)?
Here again, you are only seeing but two uses: develop or not. You say you understand my proposals, but clearly do not. Need an example?
Who would go into the park business competing against an entity that gets all its assets for free, pays nothing in insurance, can get away with a product in lousy condition, and charges virtually nothing to use it? The very existence of an armed government monopoly in the land entertainment business precludes valuable non-development uses of private property.
Maybe you should understand more about "my proposal" before you criticize it, constructively or otherwise.
Then there's the problem of free riders. Why would Viewer buy the restrictive covenant which is enjoyed not just by Viewer, but also by all of Viewer's near neighbors?
As seller, I only care about whether I get my price for my view. If I do a good job of marketing, then I enlist the wishes of as many potential customers possible to maximize total value. As a buyer, I get to stipulate how that view is managed, who gets to use the place as a park, who gets emergency food or shelter from the provider, etc. As to whether others who derive benefit from the view pay or not, it beats using government to devalue my land by force if people like looking at it. It beats NGOs using government to "protect" something on my property in order to put me out of business for quick sale to a preferred buyer. Once my neighbors were confronted with the choice of raising the cash or watching me do something ugly with it, it's amazing how fast people start to cooperate. I can always put up a fence or plant trees near their property line.
One approach would be to have government buy the restrictive covenant.
As I inferred, a typical statist "solution," incapable of overlaying the kind of dynamic complexity of which I speak.
But why would taxpayers across town be expected to pay for a restrictive covenant from which they receive no benefit?
It's called an Open Space District, and yes, cleaning ladies from across town who never see one much less go hiking, pay for the benefit of developers who build adjacent to an OSD parcel and get to market free park access to their wealthy customers for the price of a contribution. It's ugly, but it's very profitable.
What I've described in this paragraph (your Florida California example) is, in fact, the principal way restrictive covenants are used.
Such is an extremely crude system.
Viewee would have no incentive to sell viewing rights when Viewee is planning to sell the land or develop it, however.
To build or not to build, that is not the question. A seller's decision depends upon a whole array of products that don't exist (viewing being but one) and the best combination of each unique to each place (one of the benefits of markets is that they are capable of such complexity).
Lest you think the legal overhead for such a market too high, I give you automated contracting software. Lest you think trading in risk offsets too complex, I give you hedging software. Lest you think organizing a set of owners managing stopovers in an international migratory flyway business, I give you the Internet.
Obviously, the agreements would need to be adequately documented and would have to be done in such a way as to give third-party purchasers of property adequate notice of the agreements if the Viewer wishes to bind the land.
People selling products advertise to maximize their return and find out what customers want. Government cuts special deals in secret in return for favors from the politically dominant, particularly buying bond debt.