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Land Rights and Land Value Capture GLTN Online Course Development

Module 2: Land Prices and the Law of Land Rent

INTRODUCTION

1.1 In this course we are presenting a basis for understanding how it has come to be that fewer than three hundred multi-billionaires now have as much wealth as three billion people - half the population on earth at this time.[16] We are asking why millions of people die from hunger and disease each year when there is enough to meet basic needs for everyone. In Module 1 we focused on the issue of Land Rights and Poverty and learned that a disproportionately few people have laid claim to a vast amount of land and natural resources the world over. Module 2 explores another key to understanding the “land problem” – the problem of land price escalation and how wages do not keep pace with the price of housing and other basic needs.

1.2 Luning Wang tells us this about life in his city: I live in Shanghai, a modern city. Full of rich men live in big house. Full of peasant workers live in shelter. They cast their land and go here to make money. They work as labourers in the factories and building sites. Some are selling small goods and fruit on the street. Full of educated young men graduated from college work in foreign companies day and night to earn their hope. They are busy hard working late until night. The house price is much high than ever. It seems all the people in the city are working for the house. They need to work for their whole life to pay back the debt of the bank. All their money and resources have been kidnapped by the house.

It is likely the case that regardless of where you are residing on the planet right now, you, too, are aware of the problem of rising land prices alongside relatively stagnant wages.

1.3 Student Activity: Please write what you have observed about land prices and general wages in your own community:

1.4 In 1885, Wilson A. Bentley, a self-educated farmer, became the first person to photograph a single snowflake using a microscope combined with a bellows camera. http://snowflakebentley.com/

Bentley demonstrated that if you take the time to look deeply and have the proper equipment you can discover amazing structures. As a student of this course you are on a quest to learn more about land rights and the land tool called “land value capture.” Our next mode of discovery will draw from a line of thought buried within the history of land economics.

THE PROBLEM OF THE MODERN WORLD (Historical context)

2.1 In his essay “The Problem of the Modern World” John Mohawk[6] states, “When land became a ‘commodity’ and lost its status as provider and sustainer of life, Western civilization began its history of subjugation and exploitation of the earth and earth based cultures. For nearly five centuries people have been coerced from their landholdings. The problem, in the English-speaking world, has its roots in the sixteenth century.”


2.2 Before land privatization, industrialization, and the widespread use of money as a medium of exchange, people everywhere on earth lived in tribes which had defined territories. There were rules of access whereby people of diverse tribes could enter each other’s territories. Within a tribe there were rules and customs regarding land utilization. Sometimes the chief allocated and re-allocated land sites for clans and individual families. Land rights and control often passed to elder sons. Yet there were tribes, for example the Hopi of the American southwest, that passed the decision making over land allocation to a family’s youngest daughter.

2.3 Conflicts between tribes were usually border clashes over territory. Violence between human beings has been with us since thigh bones were used to bash in human sculls. One way or another new land rules would be established in peace treaties. However, it is important to note that in tribal societies there were no prisons. No one starved while others feasted. No one was homeless while others were sheltered from the elements. Times of both plenty and scarcity were shared by all.

2.4 Today’s world sees enormous wealth existing sometimes literally alongside abject poverty. The inventive capacities of human beings and the freedom to produce and exchange wealth have given us the possibility that everyone on earth could have their basic needs securely met with plenty of leisure time to develop mental, spiritual and creative potentials. The fact of persistent poverty and shrinking middle classes within developed countries indicates that there is something deeply flawed within the depths of the so-called “market system” structures. The fact that there are hundreds of millions of homeless people on our planet, that tens of thousands starve to death every day, and that more than a billion of us live in abject poverty when there is indeed “enough for everyone” is a stark reminder that some great, underlying injustice exists on earth. 2.5 Module One of this course brought to focus the reality that only a few people have come to own and control vastly more than their fair share of the land and natural resources of the planet. We will now briefly trace how the tribal land tenure systems of Europe transformed into market systems in which land came to be bought and sold and treated as a commodity for speculation and profiteering. Understanding this process should shed light on the difficulties that the people of Africa and elsewhere have faced in their efforts to move from colonialism into democratic structures of post-colonialism.

THE ENCLOSURES

“There is a frenzy now across the country by the rich and powerful in Cambodia to acquire land.”
Miloon Kothari, UN special rapporteur on adequate housing
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4207138.stm

3.1 To understand how it came to be that this most basic and obvious human right - the right to the earth itself - was somehow left out of the founding documents of democracy, it will serve our purpose here to go back to the centuries of European history that Mohawk is talking about, to the Enclosure Period. This is the time of violent direct suppression of the indigenous people of Europe. Between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, masses of peasants were evicted from their holdings or saw their common lands fenced off for sheep.[7]

3.2 The Enclosures began after the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. This was the great charter that King John was forced by the English barons to grant. Traditionally interpreted as guaranteeing certain civil and political liberties, the right to land for the common people was not among them. The first legal act to enforce enclosures was the Statute of Merton of 1235 which spoke of the need to “approve (meaning improve) the land in order to extract greater rent.”

3.3 The enclosures redefined land as “private property” and thereby gave it the status of a commodity, tradable within an expanding market system. Since the majority of people were denied access to the land and were forced to become wage laborers, labor also became a tradable commodity. The enclosures were justified by its perpetrators as necessary in order to make “improvements.”

3.4 Hear the words of Robert Ket, who led the Peasants’ Revolt of 1549 against the enclosures, heavy taxes, and other abuses (1992 Special Issue of The Ecologist, “Whose Common Future?”):

3.5

The common pastures left by our predecessors for our relief and our children are taken away. The lands which in the memory of our fathers were common, those are ditched and hedged in and made several; the pastures are enclosed, and we shut out. Whatsoever, the fowls of the air or fishes of the water, and increase of the earth - all these do they devour, consume and swallow up.... We can no longer bear so much, so great, and so cruel injury; neither can we with quiet minds behold so great covetousness, excess and pride of the nobility.... While we have the same form and the same condition of birth together with them, why should they have a life so unlike unto ours, and differ so far from us in calling?

3.6 The rebellion of 1549 was one of many peasant revolts in old Europe. Sixteen thousand insurgents formed a camp near Norwich and “scoured the country around, destroyed enclosures, filled in ditches, leveled fences.”

3.7 Over several hundred years 4,000 Private Acts of Enclosure were passed covering some 7,000,000 acres. Probably the same sized area was enclosed without application to Parliament. About two thirds involved open fields belonging to cottagers while one third involved commons such as woodland and heath. In the census of 1086, more than half the arable land belonged to the villagers. By 1876, only 2,225 people owned half the agricultural land in England and Wales and that 0.6 per cent of the population owned 98.5 per cent of it.[19] As newer agricultural methods and technologies were applied, landowners could raise the rents of their lands by phenomenal amounts. As the cash economy developed, the rent money accumulated into the hands of the landholders and the plight of the people worsened. To survive, they sometimes were forced to borrow money from the landholders at high rates of interest.

3.8 By the early 1800s tenant farmers in Ireland had to give their entire crops to the landlords as rent. When their subsistence potato crops failed from blight, there was nothing to fall back on. Some three million people died of starvation and disease between 1845 and 1849, while one million fled to the US and Canada. Ireland’s population of eight million was cut in half. During the famine Ireland exported to England enough grain, cattle, pigs, butter and eggs “to feed the Irish people twice over” as one Irish historian put it.

3.9 A poem from the Enclosures period:

The law