ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how modern property rules increasingly turn land into an asset class for monetization, capitalization, and exploitation. These changes manifest under a broad concept of land estrangement, encompassing related issues of absenteeism, concentration, commodification, financialization, and even dispossession.
This chapter examines how land estrangement, so defined, undermines the design of private property itself. Private property should amplify local decision-making about local resources and facilitate efficient resource management by aggregating many small market transactions. When only a few disconnected owners control wide swaths of land, these mechanisms fail. Ideally, private property also calibrates collective relationships to physical space and supports meaningful place-based connections and community. Land estrangement instead creates more alien, placeless environments.
These insights also reveal an opportunity: Re-calibrating property rules to better prioritize a closer connection between local ownership and local control corrects many of these property failures. It also addresses property’s inherent inequality problem. If property allows land ownership without any requirement of possession or direct experience, there is no limit to the transfer and concentration of that paper asset. But if property instead re-prioritizes direct physical connection, the system not only works more as intended but also produces an important natural boundary to help manage and scale ownership in more equitable ways.
This chapter concludes with a research agenda emphasizing the need for more empirical study of these changing ownership trends and greater attention to the limits, processes, and opportunities for imaging and implementing reconnected land relations.
Shoemaker, Jessica A, Papering Over Place: When Land Becomes Asset Class (December 12, 2022) in B Akkermans (ed), Research Agenda in Property Law (Edward Elgar Forthcoming).
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