Property (eBook)

Property, natural and imprescriptible human right, foundation of freedom, engine of wealth, maker of peace and law. The concept that runs through Western democracy like steel through reinforced concrete, that wrote the code for the formation of the United States, that underwrote the expansion of great cities, which has been embraced by developing economies as the means to prosperity and private fulfilment, and without which neither industrial nor post-industrial society, nor uncountable cultural, social and economic benefits that follow, would exist.

A good craved by individuals, that converts personal effort into permanent achievement. A foundation for a good home, for the shelter and setting of your life and the repository of your dreams.

Property. Which also has a way of making the world go mad.

Many millions are dispossessed, dislocated and excluded by the manipulations of big property. It is a currency of kleptocrats and gangsters, the medium of their transactions, the means by which they dispense patronage, entrench power and accumulate and conceal wealth. Recent years have seen a breed of developer kings – Erdoğan of Turkey, Putin of Russia, Aliyev of Azerbaijan, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, Trump of America – for whom property and politics have been mutually reinforcing implements of power.

And the idea of property has physical effects on the places where people live their lives. The investment mechanisms of real estate rebuild cities into large and controlled enclaves of profit. In Gurugram, India (formerly Gurgaon), it is considered an asset that your child can go to school without contact with the outside world. In the same city, outside the protected boundaries of individual apartment complexes, basic systems of electricity, sewage and transport break down.

My own country of Britain has played a starring role in the adventures and misadventures of property. Over the last four or five centuries it incubated modern ideas of private ownership and exported them to its colonies, such that they reshaped continents. It is a society where home ownership is particularly prized. It is also one where rising prices forced large sections of its population into tiny and insecure homes, lightless and airless, creating new divisions of class, age and region based on ownership or otherwise of your home.

House price inflation creates a property-based social order that affects security, quality of life, prospects, even health, and can cause cities to atrophy, if the young, the public-spirited and the creative are shut out – a story that has played out with similar results in Sydney, Paris, New York, Tokyo.

And then come the crashes, which bring their own miseries: negative equity, repossessions, over-leveraged owners stuck in homes they can’t sell, shocks to national economies, drastic falls in the building of new houses. These collapses, if the ability to buy is simultaneously weakened by high interest rates and a weakening economy, in practice don’t make homes much more affordable.

Much of this property-based economic activity takes a form, the extraction of rent, which tends to attract investment away from more productive uses of capital, and so threatens the success of the economies concerned. Rent-seeking directs energy, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz put it, ‘toward getting a larger share of the pie1 rather than increasing the size of the pie’. In which case such activity is a decidedly mixed blessing.

The Western idea of private property makes a promise – to both individuals and nations – that it will make you happy and rich and free. It is meant to be a reward for hard work, and the device by which the fruits of endeavour and effort are protected. Often it achieves all these things, but it has also been a tool of appropriation, exclusion and enslavement. In which case it is not an absolute good in itself but a means, that can be judged against others for its effectiveness in achieving its ends.

This book aims to show that this theory of ownership – so ubiquitous and normal that it is taken for granted, barely noticed, treated as natural – is neither inevitable nor preordained. I argue that, if property is seen as social, it can do a better job of providing shelter and security than if it is treated as purely private. If it is seen as a human instrument, and not as something given by nature, it will be more practical in serving human needs.

I start by telling stories of the triumphs and mishaps of private property – in the predominantly black city of Kinloch, Missouri, in the suburban Levittowns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and in Britain’s forty-year pursuit of what Margaret Thatcher called the ‘property-owning democracy’. I explore what ownership does to your mind, its impact on the lives and values of both haves and have-nots. I describe the role of fantasy and illusion in sustaining real estate markets in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the attractions of property deals to kleptocratic rulers, the effects on the citizens of Gurgaon of living in a city built at high speed by giant property companies.

A powerful myth lies behind the creations of these worlds, going back to the seventeenth century, which holds that property is ‘natural’ and a ‘natural right’. The middle section of the book examines this philosophy, and its physical and human consequences: the ways in which grids of property boundaries were laid onto the United States of America, and the accompanying removal of native populations.

A myth, though, is what it is. Property is better understood as a tool, a convenient fiction, sometimes a weapon. And it was fundamental to these theories of natural property that there was a place called America with apparently limitless vacant land, one with unbounded opportunity for pioneering individuals to acquire territory through enterprise and endeavour. Since this infinitude of space has turned out not to be the case, where does this leave the philosophy that depends on it?

The middle section of the book examines both this faith in the natural quality of property and its alternatives. It outlines different beliefs of what can and cannot be privately owned – all land absolutely, according to some; that it cannot be owned at all, according to others, any more than air. Or that you can own the produce earned from it, but not land itself.

As several thinkers have observed, property is social as well as private: it cannot be held without relationships with others, and to laws, customs and states. Its wealth is based not only on the works of individual owners, but also on those of neighbours, businesses and governments, through the building of infrastructure, for example. The actions of others will affect property owners, whether they like it or not: pollution and climate change have no respect for title deeds.

Given which, it becomes valuable to see what land and property look like when they are not purely private, which is the subject of the book’s third section: common land in medieval Europe, for example, or squats in Berlin during and after the Cold War, or the ‘wild settlers’ who formed self-governing communities around Vienna in the aftermath of the First World War, or the gigantic Co-op City in New York. There are no utopias in this section, but there are ideas and places that work. The rise of public housing is described – a once radical alternative to private ownership that is now ubiquitous – and the idea of the garden city, realised in post-war British new towns, which is based on the belief that uplifts in land values are shared property.

I conclude with Thomas Jefferson’s statement that land should ‘belong in usufruct to the living’ – that what matters most is the ability to benefit from it, while passing it on in good shape to future generations. This ideal requires both that property is social and that it is a means to an end, rather than the end itself. The aim here is not to annihilate the idea of property but, through a better understanding of what it is, propose how its wondrous promises might be fulfilled.

‘Property’, for the purposes of this book, is land and buildings – real estate – rather than personal belongings such as jewellery or furniture, or intellectual property. It is this sub-category of the larger term, the one that has effects on food and shelter, that has most exercised philosophers and politicians, and has had the greatest effect on the world as it is now. My focus will be on the concepts of ownership that were developed in particular in Europe and North America in modern times.

The subject requires me to explore areas of expertise that are not my own – philosophy, economics, law. I don’t claim original thought in these fields and I apologise in advance to true experts for the inevitable simplifications. My aim is to bring these ideas back to lived experiences and physical spaces. Since property is not universal, but varies from place to place, I offer no universal solutions. I hope to show, rather, that there are many productive ways of dwelling on land and in buildings.

Although property is not natural, it has roots in...