In the previous piece I suggested that almost every claim to exclusive rights over land rests on a chain of prior occupancy that, once examined, fails. The practical reality today is sharper still. Nearly all the land in the world that people actually want to live and work on has already been sold, and sold forever. Recognising this opens a clear opportunity: society can choose to treat location value differently, and in doing so release a large part of the pressure that currently shapes housing, migration, and public finance.
The most valuable urban and peri-urban land — the places where jobs, infrastructure, and services concentrate — is held under freehold or equivalent titles that treat the soil as a private capital asset. It can be bought, mortgaged, inherited, and passed down indefinitely. In high-demand cities the price of that permanent title often exceeds the value of anything that can be built on it. A modest house in central London, New York, Sydney, or Vancouver can cost several times the lifetime earnings of a median worker; the largest part of that price is the land underneath, not the building. Globally, the market value of privately held land runs into the hundreds of trillions of dollars - the largest asset class of all, concentrated in towns and cities. That concentration is not fixed by nature. It is the result of a particular choice about how title is granted.
Two things at once
Occupancy can be exclusive in practice, but the claim that a particular patch of earth may be alienated forever is a different matter. In everyday life one person or group can keep others off a piece of ground by walls, laws, force, or custom. That is exclusive occupancy, and every workable system needs some version of it. Turning that temporary or practical control into a permanent, sellable, inheritable private title — removing the land from any future common claim and treating it as an absolute commodity that can be sold forever — is a much stronger assertion. The second claim has no foundation in the physical character of land. Once it is granted, every subsequent arrival must buy their way in or remain outside. The opportunity lies in keeping the first (secure use) while letting go of the second (perpetual private alienation of location value).
This arrangement runs counter to the older recognition that land, in nature, cannot be owned or stolen in the same way movable goods can. No one made the ground. It was already there. Occupancy can be exclusive in practice, yet the permanent sale of location value converts a common natural opportunity into a perpetual private rent. Reversing that conversion — or simply refusing to extend it further — returns the value created by the community to the community that creates it.
What becomes possible
When the most productive locations are no longer locked under permanent private title, access to them can be governed by contribution and need rather than solely by ability to pay a capitalised rent. The gains from public investment in transport, education, and safety can be shared more directly with the workers and firms who generate them, instead of being captured mainly by landowners. Housing costs fall relative to wages. Migration becomes less a contest over scarce titled plots and more a movement toward places where people can add value. Inequality of location stops reinforcing itself so automatically.
Other causes of social and economic difficulty exist — technology, culture, governance, resource limits — but the permanent private enclosure of the world’s most valuable land is probably the single largest structural lever available. Grasping it does not require inventing a new morality. It requires noticing that a choice was made, that the choice can be revisited, and that the practical results of revisiting it are large and widely beneficial. Until that basic arrangement is examined, most other reforms operate inside a framework that has already decided who may stand where, and at what ongoing price. Examining it is the opportunity.
How to discuss this with people
This subject draws fierce resistance from almost everyone, regardless of intelligence or political leaning. Framing it as an opportunity rather than a grievance helps:
- Start from shared observation: “Have you noticed that the price of a house in a good location is mostly the land, and that land is sold as if it can be owned forever? What if we treated the location value as something the community could recover?”
- Use concrete local examples — a particular street, a park that was once common, rising rents after public investment — and ask what would change if the rise in land value returned to the public that created it.
- Keep the distinction clear: secure exclusive use while you occupy a place is different from the right to exclude everyone else forever and sell that right. The first can stay; the second is optional.
- Acknowledge that any practical system needs rules of use; the question is whether absolute perpetual private title is the only or the best rule, or whether a different rule would free more people to live and work where they are most productive.
- Lead with the mechanism and the gains available (lower housing costs relative to wages, public investment that pays for itself, less zero-sum conflict over “who belongs”) rather than with loss or blame.
- Invite the other person to apply the same logic to their own side of any current dispute. The opportunity is symmetrical.
The aim is not to win an argument in one conversation. It is to make the permanent sale of the earth visible as a choice, and the possibility of choosing differently visible as a practical gain for society.