Whose side are you on? Part 2, choose your side
[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
In yesterday’s post, via a this-can’t-be-happening breathless story in the Memorial Day weekend Sunday Daily Mail, we encountered a group of British Travellers who, in the manner of worker ants setting out to build a new colony, have been industriously working nights and weekends to lay out, grade, service, and occupy – in short, to develop – a large green field in Newent, Gloucestershire, for their new spontaneous community.
Actually, the nascent community is definitely not spontaneous. Speedy, yes, spontaneous, no. The operation has been meticulously and strategically planned, and the Travellers’ actions make abundantly clear that they are moving in, like it or not.
Their leader, who gave his name as Richard, said: ‘There’s 50 men here working so we don’t have time to talk to you. You’ll have to come back on Tuesday when we are done.’
All right then, whose side are you on? I mentioned yesterday that there are three possible sides, with my utterly unofficial soundbites of their positions:
1. The Travellers. “We just want a place to live our way on our own land.”
2. The government. “We have land use policies for sound reasons, and they must be respected.”
3. The local community. “We play by the rules and expect others will too.”
While you’re pondering the rights and wrongs of this, let’s follow out intrepid Travellers as they beavered away. Start with their impressive pre-launch planning and coordination:
Last week they persuaded energy firm E–ON to supply electricity to the site on the pretext that they needed it to light planned stables.
Readers, do you see the problems here? At least two are obvious:
1.
2. Fine distinctions among permissible uses. Growing horses on the land is permitted; growing people is not. Yet both people and horses need power, water, sanitation, and structures.
They then diverted the site’s existing water supply – which had fed a horse trough – to a standpipe.
Zoning means horses yes, people no!
Four legs good! Two legs bad!
Locals, who said a stream of lorries had been going to and from the camp for 15 hours a day, added that the Travellers do not have planning permission for the site.
Obviously not, and they’re making a deliberate decision to flout those laws.
At Easter Travellers who had bought a three–acre field in the village of Blackmore, Essex, moved on to the site on Good Friday with 60 men and started laying 1,000 tons of hardcore.
Judging by their behavior, the Travellers are a complex interconnected community that feels it receives nothing from the machinery of formal government. They coordinate among themselves (one invasion over Easter, another over Memorial Day), therefore they communicate among themselves, which allows them to use each successive land invasion as experimental data to inform and improve the next.
It seems clear, therefore, that
[In Blackmore], villagers were helpless until council planners went back to work on Tuesday and started the lengthy legal process of eviction.
The audacity of it relies on the Travellers’ judgment about the probability of response times the cost of lost investment, versus the value created by non-response. Let’s express it in simple algebra:
Can you solve these equations?
Risk = Investment x Probability-of-Loss
Gain = Value x (100% – Probability-of-Loss)
The Travellers’ Investment is (a) their time, plus (b) the non-recoverable costs of (i) improving the site and (ii) defending themselves in court. (The land is a recoverable cost; they can always sell it.)
Their Value is the use-value of the homes they will make – including security of tenure, controllable occupancy cost, improvability and so on.
Despite locals’ repeated pleas for help from both the police and the
The mail provides a link to a previous article showing exactly the same tactics:
A Daily Mail photograph of Crays Hill in Essex, a Travellers’ community
Travellers tarmac a new camp in a bank holiday weekend as helpless villagers watch
Marching to the faster-than-government beat of their own drummer, the Travellers were determined to finish all their structures before the opening of business Tuesday morning.
Farm worker Matthew Davies, who lives near the site, said: ‘They changed what was a pretty meadow into a building site overnight. Who knows what it will look like a few days down the line?’
It’ll look like a community of people – informal, unzoned, but not unplanned.
Local councillor Len Lawton said: ‘Villagers were told the field’s owners only wanted to build temporary accommodation for horses.’
Horses yes, people no? Is something out of whack here?
‘When the owners started making small engineering changes earlier this year, such as laying pipes, the council reminded them that major building work required planning permission.’
That shivered their timbers.
Not another council reminder!
‘The owners were asked to respond but never did.
The wheels of government then ground slowly along …
‘I have nothing against the Travellers’ lifestyle. My concern is that the legal system seems unfairly weighted against local people.’
Does, doesn’t it?
No one from
It being the weekend …
Another local said: ‘Nobody wants them here because it’s an illegal operation but our main gripe is with the council because we warned them almost half a year ago.’
Complacency in the face of threatened non-compliance is a less-desirable feature of bureaucracy. Somehow it never penetrates that people willing to flout substantive laws will have no compunction about flouting procedural ones.
‘It’s because of their ineptitude that these people can do what they have done. They will never get moved away now – it’s too late.’
Remember, in this story, you have to be on somebody’s side. Whose side are you on?
Pick one!
How about, which side are you against?
The Travellers. For. They have a lifestyle that (we presume) they cannot achieve via the formal system. They’re taking the land-use law into their own hands. Against. It’s illegal, the law applies to everybody. Get the bulldozers onsite and knock everything down.
The government. For. It must uphold the rule of law and it will, since an illegal occupation can be reversed via eviction and enforced demolition. Against. When law-abiding citizens have to watch illegal activity because they have ceded enforcement powers to a locality that is not at home, government has failed its essential function of keeping the peace.
The local community. For. They’ve played fair and warned government, yet it is they who will suffer. Against. The very same anti-development rules that exclude the Travellers benefit the current locals as a righteous cloak for NIMBYism.
Don’t like any of those choices? How about a fourth choice?
The policies are wrong. What price greenfield? As we saw in the case of Steve Jobs and his attempts to shoot his white elephant, land-use laws and bodies tend to adopt a Joshua-stopping-the-sun approach to the use of property. Mr. Jobs sought to tear down his own home because it was, in his view, economically and physically obsolescent. Richard the Traveller sought to build his own community on his own property.
Just lookin’ for a home, lord, lord just lookin’ for a home
Both were blocked by the do-nothing lobby, the committee of neighbors, those who have a vision of aggregate land use that in turn entitles them to say what may change on other people’s property.
In
As society becomes more interdependent, we adopt conventions that reduce entropy; and to ensure compliance, we give them the force of law. Because drive-on-the-right is a convention that adds value for all motorists, we can make it illegal to drive on the left.
As society urbanizes, land use becomes interdependent. I am downwind from your skunk farm; you are downhill from my tannery. To cut down the adverse externalities of urban living, we choose to surrender bits and pieces of our libertarian freedom on land use because propinquity produces conventions that add value.
As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a landmark Supreme Court case (Pennsylvania Coal, 1922), “the general rule, at least, is that while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking.” The law being an empire, it expands until thwarted – by Suzette Kelo, by Steve Jobs, or by Richard the Traveller.
Travellers have nowhere to live. Exercising the classic remedy of the slum dweller, they’re flouting the established law, changing facts on the ground and daring the authorities to enforce against them. Are they wrong, or has
It’s not obfuscation when the Supreme Court says it isn’t
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