Sadly you missed the golden era for the Mac. Back in the PowerPC days there were lots of developers making fun and useful tweaks and there was a fair amount of configurability built in. It really was a professional's Unix OS back then. Over the past decade or so I've watched the possibilities narrow with every passing version.
Although I think throwaway is correct that that isn't what they meant, people do indeed lease land in the United States. It's more common in commercial real estate, but there are also (predatory, in my opinion) land leases for "manufactured" (i.e. mobile) homes where the resident buys the home but doesn't own the land under it.