Page 10 RAIN March/April 1985 fuel bills, you do not have a legitimate claim on that equity. It belongs to no one, it belongs to every.one. If we put $7 million of public money [into a community] and we put in brick sidewalks and gas lights and facade improvell1ents, and property values soar because of it, who created that value? The [taxpayers] created that value. Who benefits from it? The people who hold title to those buildings, whether or not they live in those buildings, whether or not they ever·have or ever will, whether or not they've maintained those buildings, whether or not th-ey had any affirmative commitment or even basic sense of responsibility or decent relationship to the people of that community. A larger percentage of the American population cannot afford a new home today than was true in the middle of the Depression. There's a terrible "catch-22" facing the poor in a gentrifying neighborhood. The more they do through their own contribution of labor and capital to improve their community, their lives, and the lives of their neighbors, the more they will tend to accelerate the forces that will not only not produce any economic returns for them, but will ultimately dis.place them from the neighborhood. They won't even have the use value of the social benefits they have contributed to the community. So we would say, let's distinguish between that whiCh the resident owner has earned, and that which the community at large has earned, and that's not confiscation, that's reallocation, just allocation of equity. Now it FROM: Community Economics is a challenging concept if you're qccustomed to the market economy, but I think it's important to make that distinction, because people typically think, when you question private property or property rights or the market, that you are acting with a kind of malice that we don't believe we're acting with. In strategic terms, if we're interested in building a land reform movement in this country-and to my mind there's not only not a land reform movement, there's not even a meaningful dialogue about property in this country_:if we're going to create'that movement, like any othet movement, you've got to be able to acknowledge people-who they are, where they are, how they feel, what they want, and what they need-and you've got to be able to talk with them. So what we've been trying to do is develop a language, a dialogue, a context for addressing the fundamental issues of property that allows us to draw a broad cross-section of people into the discussion. That doesn't mean that they don't come with some trepidation, it means that they're willing to sit down and talk. The old leftist ideologue on the soap box is not going to find an audience where private property is such a fundamental aspiration. But if we understand that a larger percentage of the American population cannot afford a new home today than was true in the middle of the Depression, then in that sense the line of demarcation between the haves and the have-nots, the franchised and the disenfranchised, has shifted significantly into the middle class, and that i~ that one respect- . access to the American dream of homeownership-we are in a situation today where the middle class, the wo.rking class, and the poor have common cause, or should have common cause. That's a fundamental political opportunity that we probably will never be savvy enough to make full use of. But it's an important opportunity.... That's a political constituency. It's not an awakened or directed constituency. But our fundamental goal is not just to develop land trusts. It's to try to initiate some dialogue around these issues and to create a context and a language for that dialogue. D D
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