NEW COMMONS: Beyond of extremes of private or public property by Alice E. Ingerson
A few experimental forms (“new” forms of common property) of land ownership and management in the U.S. — including a) land trusts, b) neighborhood-managed parks, c) community-supported agriculture and d) limited equity housing cooperatives — fit Carol Rose’s description of option 4: “right way.” All aim to foster or protect specific land uses or groups of users.[INGERSON, 1997]
- AGENDA: Experiments with property rights and responsibilities
“These experiments with property rights and responsibilities raise questions that few researchers, either on urban development or on common property, have yet addressed. i) When and how should local policymakers support experiments with “common property”? For example, should local and state officials help to remove regulatory barriers to group ownership of land, or support new criteria for mortgage financing of group-owned land?
There are also long-standing legal objections to “perpetuities” — trying to tie the hands of future owners about how to use their land. To avoid these objections, land trusts must sometimes seek special legal exemptions, or even change state property laws. The longterm costs and benefits of common property experiments, however, may depend less on
the initial distribution of land rights than on shifting local politics and economic conditions. Finding answers to these questions will require close collaboration between researchers and practitioners”.[INGERSON, 1997]
1.1 BEYOND HENRY GEORGE: Land Trusts and Limited-Equity Cooperatives
“Much of land’s market value depends on whether it contains important natural resources, is located in a thriving community, or has access to services and infrastructure provided by government.” [INGERSON, 1997]
Henry George and taxation. “The nineteenth-century American philosopher Henry George argued that all these values were created by something other than private action, and should therefore be captured for public use through taxation”.[INGERSON, 1997]
1.2 LAND TRUST & LIMITED-EQUITY COOPERATIVES: New forms of land ownership. “In recent years, land trusts and other groups have experimented with distributing the costs and benefits of land development in much the same way as proposed by Henry George, but through new forms of land ownership rather than taxation. Some of these experiments include limited-equity cooperatives and land trusts such as Boston’s Dudley Street
Neighborhood Initiative.’ [INGERSON, 1997]
a) ‘The Dudley Street project has made the land in an inner-city
redevelopment area the common property of a nonprofit group, while allowing private ownership of homes and other buildings.
Using similar arguments, groups such as the Connecticut-based Equity Trust have dedicated the “social increment” in property values — the increase in land prices as a neighborhood recovers from blight, or a small town grows — to social purposes. For example, the portion of a home’s sale price that is due to the increase in land values rather than housing construction costs is used to subsidize the purchase price for the next homeowner.”’[INGERSON, 1997]
b) Incidental Open Spaces: Unowned Spaces
“Vacant lots, old cemeteries and partially buried urban streams raise a host of questions about managing urban landscapes as commons. Groups seeking to reclaim or use such incidental urban open spaces must often persuade private owners to let them use and help to maintain the land. Some geographers and planners have remapped cities’ neglected, and in practice often “unowned,” open spaces.’[INGERSON, 1997]
“Groups such as the Waterways Restoration Institute in Berkeley, California, have built on this research to help low-income city residents uncover and restore forgotten streams and their banks, turning them from neighborhood eyesores into neighborhood treasures. The process increases residents’ appreciation of the interdependence between the city and
nature, which they often think of as exclusively suburban or rural’.[INGERSON, 1997]
c) Housing
“For the elderly, single-parent households and many low-income families, detached single-family housing is either inappropriate or priced beyond reach. Yet traditional land se regulations, grounded partly in concerns about property values, favor only singlefamily housing. Advocates of privatization, in the U.S. as well as in developing or transitioning economies, often argue for converting common property into private ownership to promote reinvestment or increase property values. Organizations serving the homeless, such as San Francisco’s HomeBase, are seeing this argument applied even
to traditionally public spaces such as doorways, parks and bus benches. To discourage the homeless from occupying these spaces, some local businesses and neighbors support regulations that convert them into quasi-private property.[INGERSON, 1997]”
‘Yet in all these settings, some researchers and practitioners have also proposed to manage the housing stock as a whole as a form of common property, both to meet needs not met by single-family detached housing and to encourage neighborhood reinvestment. In the U.S., researchers such as Cornell’s Patricia Pollak have examined the sources of opposition to, and the consequences of, converting some single-family homes into group
quarters, accessory apartments and elder cottages. Many home and business owners who oppose these land uses in interviews, expecting them to depress property values, are ironically unaware that their neighborhoods already contain some of this alternative housing.’[INGERSON, 1997]
d) Converted Military Bases
‘For each base closed, the federal government offers planning funds to a single
organization. That organization must represent the entire local community affected by the base closing, from public to private interests and across local political jurisdictions. Researchers such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Bernard Frieden are now studying the way that communities around these bases, which often include very diverse interests, are being forced to create at least temporary “commons” structures to receive federal grants.
Few bases have been all the way through the conversion process yet, so it remains to be seen whether these temporary structures will be converted for permanent land ownership or management. In the Oakland-San Francisco area, however, the Earth Island Institute’s
Carl Anthony and others on the East Bay Conversion and Reinvestment Commission consciously considered long-term group or community ownership of some base lands as a way to meet regional needs for housing, open space and jobs.”[INGERSON, 1997]
___________
References
Blakely and Snyder, “Fortress America: Gated and Walled Communities in the United States,” 1995. Working Paper.
Korngold, “Private Land Use Controls: Private Initiative and the Public Interest in the
Homeowners Association Context,” 1995. Working Paper.
#INGERSON, A. (1997) ‘Urban Land as Common Property’, Land Lines, 1997, V. 9, N. 2
Steve Barton and Carol Silverman, Common Interest Communities: Private Governments and the Public Interest (Berkeley, CA: Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 1994).
Daniel Bromley, Environment and Economy: Property Rights and Public Policy (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1991).
William A. Fischel, Regulatory Takings: Law, Economics, and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Carol M. Rose, “Rethinking Environmental Controls: Management Strategies for Common Resources,” Duke Law Journal 1991, no. 1 (February 1991), pp. 1–38.