"In countries fully settled…those who cannot get land must labor for others that have it; when laborers are plenty, their wages will be low; by low wages a family is supported with difficulty; this difficulty deters many from marriage, who therefore long continue servants and single...."In the United States The Land Ordinance of 1785 set the cost of land purchased from the government at $1.00 per acre in sections of 640 acres.
This price was raised to $2.00/acre in 1800 but purchase was paid for in four equal annual payments.
In 1820 the price of Federal lands was reduced to $1.25 per acre with payment in cash.
An alternate conveyance in the 1862 Homestead Act maintained the $1.25 price.
Compare the wages various craftsmen could command:
In 1785 a journeyman carpenter in New York City was paid $1.12 ½ per day.
Here is the average hourly wage for various years, note the post Civil War inflation in the 1870 numbers and the decreases of the latter 1800's deflation:
- Occupation 1860 1870 1880 1890
- blacksmith 0.178 0.304 0.259 0.271
- carpenter 0.182 0.410 0.276 0.322
- machinist 0.158 0.260 0.227 0.243
- laborers 0.098 0.156 0.135 0.151
- Occupation 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890
- blacksmith, 10.68, 18.24 15.54 16.26
- carpenter, 10.92 24.60 16.56 19.32
- machinist, 9.48 15.60 13.62 14.58
- laborers, 5.88, 9.36 8.10 9.06
The point of all this is that in relatively short order a working person could earn enough to purchase a smallholding, that 1785 carpenter is earning almost 1 acre per day.
Even if the cost of non-Federal land was 10x the above a working person could still actually contemplate becoming a land owner. No more.
It's probably worth repeating:
4. In Countries full settled, the Case must be nearly the same; all Lands being occupied and improved to the Heighth; those who cannot get Land, must Labour for others that have it; when Labourers are plenty, their Wages Will be low; by low Wages a Family is supported with Difficulty; this Difficulty deters many from Marriage, who therefore long continue Servants and single. Only as the Cities take Supplies of People from the Country, and thereby make a little more Room in the Country; Marriage is a little more incourag'd there, and the Births exceed the Deaths....-Benjamin Franklin, “ObservationsConcerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.” (1751).
And the headline story, a repost from 2019:
Henry George had this stuff nailed.
From Real Life Magazine:
Built to Shill
The fiction of convenience makes cities less livable
Building to Code is a monthly column about how we live among cities and each other. It regards cities as what they’ve always been: not systems of capitalist resource management, but the stages that society plays out on.
Consider the humble city planner: a dutiful servant whose job it is to make the city more livable through judicious use of regulation, design, and public engagement. Perhaps they want to improve a neighborhood with some bike lanes and a community playground: two pieces of city infrastructure that benefit people who may not be able to afford a car or have a backyard. The nicer you make those bike lanes or that park, however, the more likely you are to spark gentrification and with it, the displacement of the poor whose lives you wanted to improve.
Samuel Stein, an urban geographer studying at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaching at Hunter College, wrote Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State as an elegy for his beloved planning profession. Early figures in urban planning saw their practice as a peaceful means of transitioning capitalist cities to egalitarian planned settlements. What happened instead, over the last century, was the tactical deployment of urban planners by elites to manage contests over land and power in industrial cities and post-slavery agricultural regions. Planners brought life-saving sanitation and dignified housing to countless city dwellers but also prevented the seizure of land by native, formerly enslaved, and working people.
Because the real estate state isn’t about constructing buildings so much
as owning land,
it makes sense that the complex is deeply invested in
the burgeoning “smart city” market
The challenges faced by millions of modern urbanites are imminently solvable problems of logistics and design and yet “capitalism makes the best of planning impossible,” Stein writes: “any good that planners do is filtered through a system that dispossesses those who cannot pay.” Such is the fate of anyone living under what he calls the real estate state: “a political formation in which real estate capital has inordinate influence over the shape of our cities, the parameters of our politics and the lives we lead.”
At the heart of the real estate state lie the finance, insurance, and real-estate industries (collectively referred to by the appropriately destructive-sounding acronym FIRE), the fastest growing sectors of the economy. These industries exist to increase the price of land and extract rent from what gets built on top of it. Providing shelter, safe places to work, and efficient means of getting between them comes second. The consequences are predictably cruel: vacant homes outnumber the homeless three to one and self-sustaining neighborhoods succumb to the economics of chain retail and corporate rents. City budgets wither away as they take on all the financial risk of financing construction and maintaining infrastructure while developers build cheaper, flimsier, more self-similar buildings.
Because the real estate state isn’t about constructing buildings so much as owning the land under them and charging people rent, it makes sense that the complex is deeply invested in the burgeoning “smart city” market. FIRE industries’ success come from betting on the outcomes of their own investments. Will this neighborhood gentrify in the next decade? Will that building flood within the next 30 years? Getting profitable answers to these questions require both information and finely-tuned control over human behavior and resource allocation. Increasingly, Silicon Valley’s familiar brands are finding revenue streams in the real estate state’s constituent FIRE industries.
Whereas elites of the 20th century had to actually neglect, demolish, and rebuild physical buildings to manipulate the price of land, the new titans of the FIRE industry can create artificial scarcity — from Uber availability to who your roommates are — with algorithms. With the surveillance technologies built into their Toronto and Hudson Yards projects, Google does to these buildings what they made billions doing to the internet: monitoring for advertising opportunities. Meanwhile, the We Company has grown from a humble but trendy co-working space to a globe-spanning real estate empire. Their recent smart cities initiative was introduced as part of a commitment to “globalization, urbanization, and climate change”; it is easy to imagine members-only WeCities as literal oases surrounded by guarded gates to keep out climate refugees. Big tech is poised to take the inscrutable filtering and sorting methods used on your Facebook Newsfeed or your Google search results and apply them to the streetscape....
...MORE
