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Technologos comments on The Tragedy of the Anticommons - Less Wrong
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Even in a world where people would be universally willing to do this, it may fail in the case where a unified plot of land is required for a building or project of whatever kind (as in the recent Kelo vs. New London eminent domain case).
Also, "routing around" a particular house may be difficult; it's made impossible if a group of people in the way band together and collectively hold out to take the builder's surplus.
As is all too common, though, with eminent domain, often the government is (surprise!) not very good at playing real estate developer, and the land that is seized is not put to very good use. A great example of this is with the property that was taken in the Kelo case, which to this day remains undeveloped.
Ironically, the government wasn't actually the real estate developer in this case. In fact, this was the point of the Kelo case; government has long had the power to take land for public use, and the case was about whether the government could act as something of a coercive coordinator for collecting land for private development.
Of course, had the case not taken several years to resolve, who knows what might have happened.
There are plenty of these anti-commons cases in real life, however; in my Law and Economics class we discussed a similar one in Russia, where nobody occupied the stores in a particular street because the requisite property rights were too difficult to collect, so everybody was forced into stalls right in front of the stores.
It wouldn't fail where you need a unified plot. It would just require you to spray out a wide cloud of options until some fully-connected subset of them could contain the required shape.
It might fail in the case where a very large number of people collaborate, or a very scarce resource is a show-stopper. But in that case, is it truly unfair? Or are they just setting a market rate?
Well, as long as you buy enough options, you have a reasonable chance of finding such a unified plot in what's available to you, right?