When does public property become a private good?
You might think that a public street is a public way, but what if its abutters maintain it? Even in an ostensibly civilized environment — Boston, the Hub of the Universe — tempers flare to the point of blows and vandalism when it comes to that most precious of commodities, a shoveled-out parking space. For those of you unfamiliar with Boston, it snows heavily here, and parking spaces are at a premium–they add $20,000 to $50,000 (or more!) to the price of a house. Since many folks park on the street, when it snows, to recover access to your car, you shovel, and if you shovel, you feel you ‘own’ the space:
“People who shovel themselves out have a moral right to that spot. They have invested their sweat equity.”
and you mark that with a trash barrel, a sawhorse, or a folding chair:
Beginning with a nor’easter that struck the day after Christmas, dumping up to a foot of powder, parking-strapped residents followed a decades-old practice in shoveling spaces in front of their homes and reserving them with barrels, lawn chairs, orange construction cones and even a toilet.
Once you own the territory, you fight to defend it, against other parkers:
“I know of only two incidents over a 10-year period where someone’s car was vandalized,” he said. “I condemn and deplore that type of behavior, but most people don’t go out and slash tires. They may go get a shovel and bury that car under as much snow as they can surround it with.”
(With all due respect to City Councillor Jimmy Kelly, I had more than two incidents during the few years I had to park my car on these mean streets.) And you defend your space even more fiercely against the city:
“We have more cones and barrels than the city has trucks to haul them away,” said longtime City Council member and South Boston resident James M. Kelly, invoking the language of insurrection to draw a line in the snow.
This little parable has, of course, obvious parallels in affordable housing and economic development. Human beings are primates; we mark our territory with scent glands, excretia, fences, and walls. And for us to care about territory, we have to feel we ‘own’ it. As Hernando de Soto has shown, the transformation from squatting to homesteading takes time:
The same was true of the United States in 1783, when President George Washington complained about “banditti … skimming and disposing of the cream of the country at the expense of the many.” These “banditti” were squatters and small illegal entrepreneurs occupying lands they did not own. For the next one hundred years, such squatters battled for legal rights to their land and miners warred over their claims because ownership laws differed from town to town and camp to camp. Enforcing property rights created such a quagmire of social unrest and antagonism throughout the young United States that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Joseph Story, wondered in 1820 whether lawyers would ever be able to settle them. Do squatters, bandits, and flagrant disregard of the law sound familiar? Americans and Europeans have been telling the other countries of the world, “You have to be more like us.” In fact, they are very much like the United States of a century ago when it too was a Third World country.
