The Unbounded Home: Property Values Beyond Property Lines

Abstract

What does property mean, here and now, in the early twentyfirst-century United States?This book approaches the question by examining a set of problems surrounding our society's most familiar, important, and emotionally freighted manifestation of property-the home.That the home has evolved as a resource over the past two centuries should not surprise even the most casual observer of social history.In 1790, just over 5 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas; by 2000, the figure was 79 percent, and more than 80 percent of the population resided within metropolitan areas. 1 Homeownership rates have also grown significantly; about two thirds of metropolitan area householders are now homeowners. 2 The residential experience for most Americans thus uneasily combines the profound interdependence of metropolitan life with the promise of unbridled autonomy that homeownership connotes.Property law has done surprisingly little to respond to these transformations in residential life or to address the resulting tension.Although land use controls attempt to counteract the spillovers that interdependence produces, they tend to operate in a blunt and categorical manner that introduces new difficulties.Meanwhile, our notion of home as a form of property remains mired in outdated concepts, dominated by fencelines and surveys, metes and bounds.My project here is to expose the increasingly poor fit between widespread property concepts and the home as it exists today, to isolate the problems caused by that divergence, and to suggest some ways of addressing it.1

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