“Search for a
congenial relation between man and land has gone on throughout recorded time,
for that relation largely shapes the relation between man and man.” Paul Schuster
Taylor, 1979
“What’s your book about?” people ask when I tell them I’m working on
one. I usually say “agriculture and the
common good,” sometimes adding a few items lodged under that umbrella like
“small farms,” “water,” and “sustainability.”
But the thread running through it all is land tenure.
“Land tenure” is not a term most
people use, although it applies to every single one of us. It means the system that determines peoples’
access to land, which is the source of all wealth as well as subsistence, and the
subcategories of relationships determined by that system.
In this country, the system of
private property determines individuals’ access to land except where government
control has interceded (like school grounds or Yosemite National Park, for instance.) The subcategories in our system are “landed,”
“tenant,” and “landless” or “homeless.”
The concept of private property is so important to our entire
socio-political-economic system that we take it for granted, almost
god-given. To criticize private property
here, even if the intent is to help, is like burning the flag.
What’s good about private property (i.e., individual ownership,)
particularly when we’re talking about land, however, isn’t always good for the
community. One of the worst things for any given community is when some of its land (or most, or
all, as in "company towns,") is owned by people who do not live within it, often referred
to as “absentee ownership.” What’s wrong
about it is that decisions for the land’s use by the absentee owner are made in
a vacuum of knowledge about the community’s needs and beyond the community’s
ability to influence those decisions, to encourage or coerce the owner to care about the effects of those decisions on people within the community or the community as a whole.
Last week’s paper carried a
wonderful example of the importance of land tenure in a beautifully written
letter to the editor by Chris and Sally Brewer regarding the closure of
Exeter’s True Value Hardware. The letter
pointed to a cause the previous week’s news article had skimmed over
lightly: the landowner’s decision to
raise the rent 40%, with two weeks’ notice. It’s the kind of action landowners
take when they want to remove the tenant and do not have cause to evict.
The Brewers then went on to suggest
a motive - to get a tax write-off for having an empty building - and to flush
out the implications of that for the community (lost sales tax revenues, the
impacts on other businesses of having a large empty building downtown) as well
as for the business owners themselves (lost source of income and community
identity.) They then went on to express the
hope that “the building owner who started this self-centered and thoughtless
action realizes the extent and harm his actions have caused good people and a
good community.”
That last sentence might have some
impact if the current owners are local.
The Brewers’ letter did not name or identify the location of the current
owners, only that the former owners (who also had owned the hardware business
housed there) sold the building several years ago. This is simply to say that I do not know if
the current owners are absentee, or simply acting like it. My experiences here in Lindsay document that
local owners can be as oblivious to the community’s welfare as absentee owners
can.
But it’s a question we should
ask. Who will look out for the needs of
the community when the landowners of its spaces live too far away to know or
care?
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Trudy
Wischemann is a community development researcher who writes. You can send your empty building nightmares
to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247
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