Re-Placing Property
This Article analyzes the complex relationship between property and placemaking. Our most basic property and land tenure choices—including the design of the fee simple itself—shape people-place relations in powerful ways. By unearthing this important relationship between property and placemaking, this Article also reveals how pervasive—but unorganized—claims about place and place attachment already are across a range of modern land conflicts. Because property theory has not been fully transparent about many of these placemaking effects, our property choices often result in outcomes that are unequal, inconsistent, and opaque, prioritizing some existing place relations while ignoring or rejecting others. By building a more comprehensive placemaking account—with examples from Indigenous pipeline protestors to the absent and now-urban heirs of family farms and the emergence of new build-to-rent suburban housing divisions—this Article introduces a new taxonomy for evaluating the relative protection we afford to various place and place-attachment claims. This new framework separates the individual, collective, and ecological benefits of positive place relations from the risks of either overprotected place attachments (as in the case of hereditary land dynasties and exclusionary wealth) or land ownership without any attachment at all (as in the transformation of land and housing into asset classes for commodification and financialized capture).
This clearer focus on placemaking also puts property law—and land tenure—at the center of core social, economic, and climate challenges, including growing institutional and foreign investment in U.S. farmland (as rural landscapes depopulate and agriculture becomes even more industrialized) and private equity’s increasing appetite for single-family housing (as the United States’ glaring wealth gap continues to expand). It also forces us to confront property’s ongoing role in the dispossession of groups, cultures, and communities that are not (or are no longer) recognized as legal owners and our repeated failure to accommodate the access needs of individuals not born into hereditary land or wealth. Weaving together both rural and urban case studies, this Article ultimately offers novel entry points to some of property’s perennial problems, including pervasive distributional inequities, while providing new language and a fresh lens for reimagining more just and sustainable property relations for our rapidly changing world. In a final series of property-based personal stories, the article centers new forms of access rights—including some public rights over private properties—as instrumental to reconnecting and collectively reimagining the kinds of places we want to make together.