Unimproved Land Differs in Three Ways
from Any Other Kind of Private Property

Perry Prentice

[Reprinted from a special 84-page booklet on land,
House & Home Magazine, August, 1960]

1. Unimproved land is the only kind of private property that the owner did nothing to create. He just found it ready-made (or bought it from someone who found it ready-made).

2. Unimproved land is the only kind of private property whose value grows, not because of anything the owner does, but because of what thousands of other people do. Said the great Victorian economist John Stuart Mill: "Landlords grow rich in their sleep." Suburban land would command only a small fraction of today's price if the city had grown up somewhere else.

3. Unimproved land is the only kind of private property anyone can own for years without doing anything or assuming any responsibility to maintain and protect his investment (other than paying a tax which is usually small and is always deductible).

If you invest your money in a building, your investment will crumble and decay within 20 years without constant upkeep.

If you invest your money in machinery, it will be obsolete within 20 years.

If you invest your money in stocks they will soon be worthless unless the company is well managed year in and year out.

If you write a bestseller book, your copyright and its renewals cannot run longer than 56 years. If you perfect a great invention, your patent (which is not renewable) can run only 17 years. After that you have no more legal claim to your own brainchild than anyone else.

But unimproved land, which was there for a million years before the Pilgrims landed, will still be there a million years after you are dead, regardless of what you do or do not do about it.

The moral foundation for private property rests on our belief that in a free society every man owns himself and therefore is entitled to own whatever he himself creates. This foundation is very shaky indeed under the private ownership of unimproved land (unless, of course, the owner performs at least some of the essential functions of the land developer, who is surely worthy of his hire). That is why moralists and law givers from Moses to Jefferson and Lincoln have questioned any man's right to hold more land than he can use.

By definition, unimproved land is land whose owner has done nothing to earn a profit. So it is a strange paradox that our laws not only give private ownership of land all the protection they give the private ownership of other property; they go further than that to give the ownership of unimproved land the most favorable possible tax treatment and greater permanence-without-effort-than any other form of private property.