Property Rights: The Owner as Planner

Abstract

The private property owner is the primary land use decision maker under the Anglo-American tradition of private ownership. Whether an individual, a family, a partnership of investors, or a corporation, the owner of real property determines how to best use that parcel of land (including buildings, if any) in light of geographic, economic, legal, and personal circumstances. The owner also determines when a change in existing property use should occur. The role of government, especially at the local level, is to nudge the private owner in desirable directions, either through land use regulations that define which uses are allowed or prohibited in certain locations or through tax or fiscal incentives to encourage particular uses of property, such as affordable housing or downtown commercial redevelopment.

There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of the rights of any other individual in the Universe.

William G. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1768

Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.

Theodore Roosevelt, Speech at Osawatomie, August 31, 1910