The structural critique of urban land tenure: How the leasehold system generates decay and exploitation

“ Nothing whatever has been said, or can be said, in rational defence of leasehold tenure. It is a custom wholly destitute of merit, and without beneficence. It is alike injurious to the freeholder, and to those who build, and buy, and rent the houses, and inhabit them. It degrades the moral tone and spirit of the people, it prevents municipal reform, it is a constant and increasing injury to the workmen and the poor, and in poetic building art the whole of London is its pattern card. ”

“ They are exclusive, as they say, conservative; and by their long infliction of bad laws, and their support of evil customs, by the cost and intricacy and delay of legal transfers, and by the sad maleficence of leasehold tenure, they have kept, and still they keep, the working classes alienated from the soil, and in a state of degradation. We are often told that land is free, is not 'tied up' by any statute. ”

“ The effect of leaseholds on the working classes is, however, of more consequence than loss of dignity; it tends with them directly to disease, to dissipation, and to death. At least one half of London houses are unfit for human beings to reside in. All the rooms are made so small that any locomotion in them causes injury to walls, partitions, furniture, and fixtures. Everything becomes dilapidated, roughly worn, and consequently dirty. ”

“ Houses are built in flimsy fashion upon the express idea that they are intended to last only the specified term; and during the expiring years of the lease, repairs are grudged, and the dwellings rendered unhealthy to the occupier and unsafe to the passers-by. If a man has a house which is erected upon [Pg 114] leasehold land, and therein builds up, by his own skill and industry, a good business, he is absolutely at the mercy of the ground landlord when the lease expires. ”

“ They would neither, have the use of a capital belonging to their landlords, nor would the want of this be made up by the intense motives to bodily and mental exertion which act upon the peasant who has a permanent tenure. On the contrary, any increased value given to the land by the exertions of the tenant, would have no effect but to raise the rent against himself, either the next year, or at farthest when his lease expired. The landlords might have justice or good sense enough not to avail themselves of the advantage which competition would give them ”

“ All this is hopeful and judicious; it appears that other things than communism may be even less agreeable to contemplate; besides, it is allowed to be 'notorious all over England that no cottages are so bad as those that are cheaply run up,' — on leasehold tenure? — 'either to live in or to let, by persons of the labouring grade.' To save discussion we accept the statement, and reply that as the leasehold system has extended and is nearly universal, its bad influence has brought and keeps the standard of house-building miserably low. ”

“ But in the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty. It means that people will put up with anything – any hole and corner slum, any misery of bugs and rotting floors and cracking walls, any extortion of skinflint landlords and blackmailing agents – simply to get a roof over their heads. I have been into appalling houses, houses in which I would not live a week if you paid me, and found that the tenants had been there twenty and thirty years and only hoped they might have the luck to die there. ”

“ It is a singular example of human inertia that men should have continued until now to endure the tyranny and extortion which a small minority are able to inflict by their possession of the land. No good to the community, of any sort or kind, results from the private ownership of land. If men were reasonable, they would decree that it should cease to-morrow, with no compensation beyond a moderate life income to the present holders.
The mere abolition of rent would not remove injustice, since it would confer a capricious advantage upon the occupiers of the best sites and the most fertile land. ”

“ The landlord simply stands out as the representative of the real grievance. To remove him would not remove the evil; agitation would not cease; murder would still stalk abroad at noonday. The real grievance is the false system which makes the landlord possible. The appropriation of the fertile acres of the soil of Ireland, which created and maintains a privileged class, a class that while performing no labor, wrings from the toiler, in the shape of rents, so much of the produce of his labor that he cannot on the residue support himself and those dependent upon him aggravates the situation. ”

“ Certainly, the builders cannot be the losers; and, in brief, the public pays. When to this dead loss are added all the multiplied and heavy untaxed costs of ‘architects’ and lawyers, the insurance profit, twenty-five per cent, or even thirty, for the tradesmen, and the constant outlay that the rickety and unsound work requires, it must be clear that leasehold house providing is a most extravagant and wasteful system, which, when they learn to understand it, men of sense will not endure. ”

“ They are then called 'rookeries.' Thus in every period of its course, in its preparation and its consequences, leasehold tenure is a noxious system, and the transmutation of the freehold is in every way an injury to the proprietor.
But building speculators are, like leasing freeholders, the victims and results, if they are also agents, of the leasehold system. These poor men are seldom destitute of merit; they are probably indifferent workmen, who, by force of character and exceptional capacity for supervision and control, have been advanced in their own sphere to some position of command. ”

“ It is notorious that overcrowded, insanitary "slum" property is the most paying form of house property to its owners. The part played by rent in the problems of poverty can scarcely be over-estimated. Attempts to mitigate the evil by erecting model dwellings have scarcely touched the lower classes of wage-earners. The labourer prefers a room in a small house to an intrinsically better accommodation in a barrack-like building. ”

“ The problem of housing for the poor is one of the most acute facing the Nation. The poor are relegated to ghettos and are beset by substandard housing at exorbitant rents. Because of their lack of bargaining power, the poor are made to accept onerous lease terms. Summary eviction proceeds are the order of the day. Default judgment in eviction proceedings are obtained in machinegun rapidity, since the indigent cannot afford counsel to defend. Housing laws often have a built-in bias against the poor. Slumlords have a tight hold on the Nation. ”

“ For the wage earner the housing problem is not so easily nor so successfully solved. He is usually between the devil of the speculative builder and the deep sea of the predatory landlord, each intent upon taking from him the limit that the law allows and giving him as little as possible for his money. Going down the scale of indigence we find an itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, or houses so abject that they are an insult to the very name of home. ”

“ As one drops down the economic scale the present failure to properly house the wage-earner becomes more striking. For the family of the semi-skilled worker, for the factory worker's family whose income is hardly larger than average factory wage, for the lower-paid ranks of the "white collar" worker and of the government employee, decent housing in new construction is scarcely to be had to-day anywhere. And as for the housing problem of the unskilled worker, married and with a normalsized family, it may be a long time indeed before he can be provided for. ”

“ It never ours to the passer-by that people live in these wretched. unhealthful hovels because they MUST and not because they want to. It has been found that many families pay out nearly a third of what they earn for the one item of rent. Landlords find that the old tenements without any improvements bring in the most profits, so they rent these year after year until they become uninhabitable. The high rents which the working people pay must be raised in some way, so they take lodgers and boarders. ”

“ Let them address themselves to this matter and no longer shirk their duty with regard to the housing of the poor. Let them stop for ever the miserable pretence of housing the poor that they at present pursue. For be it known that they house "respectable" people only, those that have limited families and can pay a high rental. ”

“ The poor, or, indeed, the working classes generally, were powerless to alter or amend the construction of the dwellings in which they were compelled to reside, still less to alter their surroundings. Any improvement in the condition of their dwellings could only be by voluntary action on the part of the landlords, or of interference by Government to compel that measure of justice to the poor, and of economy to the ratepayers. ”

“ Landlordism shares with Capitalism the plunder of Labour. Why are rents high in Australia? Because here Labour is scarcer, its wages correspondingly higher and therefore Landlordism steps in to filch from Labour its hard-won comforts, and once more reduce it to the necessities of existence. The American slavers had to spend more in housing and keeping any fixed number of their slaves in serviceable condition than Capitalism spends in wages. Capitalism and Landlordism, like good Christian Institutions, leave the living to keep alive their living, and the dead to bury their dead. ”

“ Landlords have obstructed every measure of land reform; thwarted food production; obstructed housing, small holdings and land reclamation; demanded extortionate prices for land for public needs and appropriated as unearned increment a large part of the value of every tenant’s improvement. “For the Labour Party” therefore “the substitution of public for private ownership in land (subject to equitable treatment of each person whose property is required for the public good and to a proper security of tenure for the home and the homestead) underlies in principle all its specific proposals.” ”

“ This personal parasitism of property owners is aggravated by provisions of property law under which the owners of property can give, sell or bequeath these sources of unearned income to family members, friends, associates.
Eventually, unearned income, handed on through generations, creates a class or even a caste of citizens who live without rendering an equivalent of services, on the labor of their fellows, adding a significant amount to the total of overhead costs. ”

“ He says that this enhancing of leases will be the decay of the commonwealth. It must needs make all things dear, both for back and belly—all but landed men will suffer. And even they were richer when their lands went at the old price. When the landlord increases his rent, the farmer must ask more for his wool, cattle, and all the victuals, else he too cannot live, Brinklow has a chapter on "the enclosing of parks, forests, and chases." This is no small burden to the commons; the deer destroy the corn and grass. ”

“ It springs from the colossal economic waste in land, in municipal and private construction, the cost of which accumulates until it becomes a crushing burden on housing. This burden is further weighted with an excessive load of charges for speculative financing.
Deterioration in architecture
How can the wage-earner, even the fairly prosperous individual, be expected to carry this burden? Of course he cannot. He is helpless in the face of the relentless operation of factors which he, as an individual, cannot control. ”

“ The present system which treats land as private property and prevents free access to it, hampers industry, checks production, crowds the towns by depopulating the countryside, obstructs the provision of good housing, lowers the standard of public health both physical and moral; this Conference strongly urges the Government to bring forward, as early as possible, some scheme for the nationalization of land so as to abolish the present unjust system of land ownership and land leasing. ”

“ But is not this attempt to throw the whole blame of and punishment for the present deplorable condition of society on to a single class of men a very great mistake? In what way are landlords as a class less honest than the average citizen? Give the average citizen the opportunity of becoming a landlord and of appropriating the land values created by his tenants, and he will embrace it to-morrow. If then, the average man is a potential landlord, to attack landlords as individuals is very like a nation drawing up an indictment against itself, and then making a scape-goat of a particular class. ”

“ During the last quarter of a century efforts have been made by several philanthropic societies, public companies, and private individuals to lessen the evils of overcrowding and to improve the dwellings of the labouring class. Much good has, no doubt, been done by these means, and the rents of working-men's houses would but for these efforts have risen much higher even than they have done. But these efforts do not reach the real evil. In very few cases have the building companies been able to purchase and remove the houses unfit for human habitation. ”

“ Let us, as rapidly as possible, expand the minimum wage policy, which we have already adopted in our mines, our confectionery, our tailoring, our shirt-making, our chain-making, and other industries. Let us press forward measures for the decasualisation of labour. Let us make town-planning compulsory, with a restriction on the number of houses per acre, provide all towns with adequate transit facilities, and give improved powers for the acquisition of land. Let us lend money more freely to Public Utility Societies, and lessen the burden of rates on small houses. ”

“ Socialists demand, not penalties against landlordism, but the community appropriation of rent—whether it is in the hands of the actual farmer or landlord. Why, moreover, seek to discriminate against those who are in possession now, and then favor those who will be in possession after the new dispensation, by giving the latter an almost permanent title? May there not be as many landless agricultural workers forty years hence as there are now? Why should those who happen to be landless in one generation instead of the next receive superior rights? ”