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‘The landlord is a gentleman who does not earn his wealth … his sole function, his chief pride, is the consumption of wealth produced by others.” It was 1909, and a liberal politician was launching an assault on a class of people who – in the eyes of many – contributed nothing to Britain’s advances in industry while living off its gains.
A little over a century after David Lloyd George’s Limehouse speech, and it feels as though the issue of land has returned to politics: an analysis of MPs’ financial interests revealed that a quarter of all Tory MPs earned more than £10,000 from renting out property, while 44 Labour MPs – 11% – did the same. The winner of the most dazzling political campaign of the past year, New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani made “freeze the rent” his central pledge. On the right, a revolt against property taxes is gathering pace. Journalist Mike Bird’s history of the most basic asset arrives, then, at an opportune moment.
Land ownership has, of course, been critically important for most of history, tied up with financial independence and social status. But its role changed dramatically with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of cities.
The most valuable companies in the world now design chips, develop software or extract oil. The wealthiest escape high taxes by relocating to the Gulf, and some dream of “network states”, virtual countries that organise and govern themselves online. Henry George, the journalist and economic thinker who called for a single tax – on land – was widely read in the 19th century but is now largely forgotten. George saw monopolies of land ownership as the source of economic inefficiency and the root of inequality, since the gains from land increasing in value went to landlords and speculators rather than productive businesses.
But since the early 20th century, politics on the left has been organised around class, and on the right around questions of identity and personal liberty. The rise of widespread property ownership seemed, for a time, to have taken the sting out of land as a political issue. George’s only substantial legacy was the board game invented to spread his ideas, The Landlord’s Game, better known to most children in its later incarnation: Monopoly.
Bird charts the return of land as a central economic and political force. Real estate was used as collateral for loans which enabled the creation and expansion of businesses, and it became a source of revenue for companies too: McDonald’s, which is built on a franchise model and owns the land where many of its franchises are located, makes more money from rent than it does from royalties on Big Macs and the rest of its menu.
For decades, property has been central to China’s economic growth, with local governments relying on land sales for revenue and citizens investing their life savings in the sector. The real estate boom has weakened dynamism in other sectors. Bird suggests the country now faces a painful choice: allow prices to crash and wipe out middle-class wealth, let prices stay high and sap the rest of the economy, or resign itself to gradual stagnation. This is the “land trap” of the title.
There are a few important absences in Bird’s narrative. There’s little on the role of engineering and technology, for example. “Buy land, they’re not making it any more” is the famous saying, but in fact that’s false: steel frames and elevators allowed Chicago to become a city in the sky, while the Hoover Dam’s water raised Las Vegas from the Mojave Desert. Surprisingly, there’s nothing on how floods and wildfires intensified by climate change can destroy the value of land, though that’s an increasing prospect everywhere from the Gulf coast of the US to the Mediterranean, with ownership structures amplifying the unfairness. When fields flood, tenant farmers with the least resources suffer most and find it hardest to rebuild.
The central puzzle of land is arguably its failure to keep pace with improvements in other aspects of life: the devices people scroll on may be vastly more sophisticated than the dumbphones of the 1990s, but the quality of the homes they live in has improved little in the past century. This book is a masterly introduction to the economics of land ownership, though it has less to say about the social consequences.
Private landlords have little incentive to invest when they can easily fill the homes they let out, while states increasingly lack the funds for repair and renovation. The combination of a shabby private rental sector (its expansion fuelled in Britain by the buy-to-let mortgages created 29 years ago) and shrinking public provision, stripped away by right-to-buy, is one of the main reasons land has become a salient issue once again. The system we created has failed to give people the shelter they need, and instead facilitated the return of slums.
