Depreciating Land - Legally?

[Bryan Hancock]

I ran across this article this evening when I was researching some other tax matters:

Who says you can't depreciate land?

The basic procedure seems to be:

1. Split the improvements from the land

2. Deed the land to a trust you set up with an independent trustee

3. Make a trusted adviser the independent trustee and your children the beneficiaries of the trust

4. Create land lease

The lease would the be deductible. The delta between your marginal rate and that of your children seems to be the savings.

Has anyone ever heard of this? If you own quite a bit of expensive land this would seem to be something potentially fairly lucrative to generate some extra deductions for those paying high taxes.