Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from the previous Part 2 and Part 1.]

 

The idea is as old as the Roman army, as American as the Homestead Act, and as timely as formalizing slums in the global south via urban homesteading.

 

Now for a little more fun: could you use it to stimulate private colonization of the Moon? 

 

See any plots you particularly like?

 

That’s the question posed by Drake Bennett in The Boston Globe

 

One of the more straightforward models for celestial private property has been put forward by Wasser. He made his case most recently in an article in the winter issue of the Journal of Air Law and Commerce: The United States and other national governments, he argues, should pass what he calls “land claim recognition” legislation.  Under such laws, courts would recognize private property claims on the moon or other celestial bodies so long as the claimant has established a settlement there. 

 

In a phrase, Lunar homesteading.

 

 

Wasser proposes limiting [aggregate? – Ed.] lunar property-holders to plots the size of Alaska - that leaves plenty for others, but also is big enough that selling it off would turn a profit even after what are sure to be the enormous expenses incurred getting to the moon in the first place.

 

Don’t forget, while the Moon has no beaches, it has a lot of surface area: although its area is only 7.4% of Earth’s, Earth is three-quarters water.  The Moon’s surface area is about 30% bigger than all of North America.

 

By the way, what is the good land on the Moon?  Let’s apply basic real estate thinking.

How much would the settlement rights be worth?

 

Communications links matter.  The Moon always keeps the same face toward Earth, and for most people communication with Earth would be useful.  So Nearside is for vacationers and retirees, and Farside is for interstellar astronomers.

Tourist attractions add value.  Anything near a historic site – like Tranquility Base – would be an immediate draw.  Valuable, too, would be abutting a planetary or lunar park – you always want barriers to competition.

 

After that, it’s pretty much wherever the infrastructure gets established.  Nobody thought land in southern Nevada would be worth anything either.

 

In fifty years, from this:

 

… to this …

 

… to this!

 

What makes land valuable?  Development. 

 

A key stipulation, though, would be that space property ownership deeds would require the owners to sell people rides to whatever celestial body the property was on - thereby speeding up the process of settlement and spreading around the benefits of whatever space-travel breakthroughs had been arrived at by the property holder.

 

The reasoning is just like railroads, telephone networks, and cable TV – you build it, you own it, you can rent it, but you cannot deny carriage to your competitors.

 

“The point of all this is to open the frontier for everyone,” Wasser says, “and obviously being willing to sell rides to the settlement would be a way of accomplishing that.”

 

Another model, proposed by the Houston-based lawyer Wayne White, would make ownership contingent on physical occupation.  

 

That’s another variant of homesteading.

 

A company could claim ownership of a piece of space only as big as its employees could physically occupy, and only so long as they were actually there. Such a limitation would, he has argued, prevent people from claiming more property than they could develop.

 

That could get tricky; what does it mean to ‘occupy’ the space?

 

In Smithtown, Long Island, it meant ‘ride around it on a bull in one day.’

 

A third model tries to ensure that the most advanced national and private programs wouldn’t scoop up all the available celestial property as soon as it became accessible. The extraterrestrial property regime envisioned by Glenn Reynolds, a professor and space law specialist at the University of Tennessee Law School, and Robert Merges, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, would be, in most ways, a basic first-come, first-served system. But it would have one key condition: A portion of the total available property would be set aside for a period of time to give developing nations a chance to catch up and to bid once they’d reached the point at which they were technologically and financially able.

 

It is far too early to know how valuable such property claims would be, but scientists and engineers point to a few potential sources of value in the celestial bodies currently within our reach. A medium-sized asteroid, for example, can contain trillions of dollars of gold, platinum, iron, zinc, and aluminum - enough that whoever figured out how to profitably extract it and get it to Earth would single-handedly collapse world prices for those metals and still make out like Croesus.

 

 

Asteroid mining has long been the stuff of great sf pulp stories like Asimov’s Marooned Off Vesta or Doc Smith’s Lensman series.

 

Will Bill, meteor miner

 

There is, though, a surprising lack of consensus over the question of whether private citizens can today own property in space. The closest thing that space has to a constitution is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, and while it forbids claims of national sovereignty in space, it doesn’t mention ownership by private citizens.

 

Heinlein’s Delos David Harriman would have had a field day with that!

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there have already been efforts to claim extraterrestrial property.

 

Most likely, from the same nutters who are always tried to secede their house from America so they can avoid taxes.

 

A Nevada-based company called the Lunar Embassy sells deeds to one-acre “prime view” moon plots for $19.99 - founder Dennis Hope claims to have sold more than $10 million worth of lunar real estate so far.

 

Wonder what the title insurance policy looks like …

 

The Outer Space Treaty could, with enough political will, be changed, but some space lawyers believe that would be a dangerous thing to do. The international space law regime may be outdated, says Leslie Tennen, a Phoenix-based lawyer who consults with government and industry on space law questions, but the system has been successful in its main goal: keeping space peaceful. Allowing private ownership claims in space has the potential to change that. In space there is no sovereign government to resolve competing territorial claims, and if the claimants are from different countries, he says, there’s a good chance their respective governments would feel compelled to get involved.

 

You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?  Settlement and possession are going to define the law.  Heinlein foresaw that as well, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

 

Origin of the phrase, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch

 

To understand it, you’ll have to read the book

 

“You’re going to export all of the problems that have plagued us on Earth regarding defending title, and all the innumerable wars that has led to,” says Tennen.

 

I don’t think the wars were about defending title …

 

To law professor Glenn Reynolds, these concerns are overblown, and ignore what to him is the great value of the property right: people take better care of something if they own it.

 

A one-man blogosphere

 

Absolutely.  People value what they pay for.

 

“If you give someone grazing rights on communally owned land, well, that’s the definition of the tragedy of the commons,” he says.

 

For thinkers like Wasser, celestial private property is important not simply because of helium-3 mining or moon-based solar arrays, it’s important because it would allow for large-scale colonization. In such a future, Wasser believes, it simply doesn’t make sense not to have private property in space, any more than it would make sense for people in the United States not to be able to buy and sell and inherit their homes.

 

If you want to make property improve, let someone own it.  That was true in Roman times, true on the American frontier.  It’ll be true on the Moon, and it’s true in urbanizing slum environments.

 

Hernando De Soto, meet Robert A. Heinlein

 

 

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