If ever I run this town, even before I take revenge on my enemies I will have a statue commissioned. A bronzed Anne Cox-Chambers already man’s the traffic island outside my front door, permanently enjoying a newspaper as only an owner of one could do. Around Underground there are life-size bronzes from the ’30s and 1890s. Naturally we have a smattering of Civil War heroes (or villains), some artsy friezes and a Phoenix both in abstract and figure. There is at least one missing. The subject has not been gone long enough to become historic but I remember and will see her commemorated. She was always in the company of statues when I saw her, usually Herman Talmadge. She stood quite nearly as a statue; an elderly woman, clearly a nifty number from the Mad Men era would stand unmoving in a parka and gloves in the winter, in a sundress with a wet hanky on her head in summer, holding a stack of leaflets in each arm. She didn’t hand them out. She couldn’t have since both hands were full, the half-reams perfectly her cubit. Sometimes they were single sheets and sometimes it would be a stapled pair. Did I mention the rocks? She also had a rock on each pile to act as a paperweight. Around her neck hung a small sandwich board explaining in meticulous print how the private ownership of land was the source of near all of man’s troubles.

It took about three years of seeing this woman at her post to gingerly take one of her pamphlets. She looked at me not at all, you could think she was blind, but when I took the pages and left the rock in its spot like a cheap magic trick she chirped up, “Thank you.” I never saw anyone else ever take one. As I recall the argument was pretty solidly formed as you will often find eccentrics’ rants to be. Who could argue that territorialism is not at the root and branch of nearly every struggle? As usual the easy utopianism doesn’t pass any serious muster. While the indictments of real estate as a concept were just about on target, the solution was a nightmare proposition. Basically the idea was a public trust, perhaps like the National Parks. Owners would get long term leases at sweetheart rates but there could be no inheritance. The use of the land would be tightly controlled, more tightly even than now, we presume. The whole thing would be administered by the county with an elected board. As Cox’s interests made the newspaper so enchanting, I think only someone who had suffered quite badly under the current system could really trust anything so daft. And that is the same aspiration of the branch office of Occupy Atlanta just opened two miles east of the main campus, in the yard of a yellow brick house.

It shows all the hallmarks of The Occupation. Bicycles worth a couple thousand bucks are leaned up against a short, sad, chainlink fence. A dozen or more patchworked signs create a screen behind which a few fuzzy fellows are enjoying a smoke to such a degree that I at first thought they were cooking out. No banks. No landlords. Give BACK the DEED! No chains for gains…. The house in question is nearing foreclosure. It seems to have been halted for PR reasons, which is fine; congratulations to the bank for being accommodating and to the Occupiers for forcing the accommodation but, as with that Dixie Belle’s proposition, it is all for show. Are the Occupiers paying rent? That seems unlikely and even if they were, and at a rate that could cover the house note, how long could that go on? Especially since the “protest” violates residency laws that are enforced pretty vigorously on everyone else. It is likewise with the Occupiers in the park. They sit in violation of a law that is enforced against men down on their luck and trying to grab some sleep in relative shelter. They have no message, like the Occupiers but unlike the Occupiers they do not pretend to. These fellows are told to move along, move along. Head down to Pine Street, the warehouse-size flop which is also where the Occupiers flee on the odd days the cops look cross at them. When they go they are given the top floor and do not mix with the general bum population as the last time they did, a nasty TB outbreak struck the tramps! Oddly, these spokesdudes for la vida en fera natura prove a territorial bunch themselves.

The very concept of real estate is under assault where it has not been abandoned to squatters and easements. It is the eternal struggle between those with land and those without. This, our statue-model and the Occupiers would do away with. All will be held in common and all will be disbursed by common rules. That is genius. Why didn’t anyone ever think of that before? The contact-high from believing such a presumption or being around it when it is being believed is a powerful narcotic. The simple fact is that no, this is NOT an original idea. In fact wherever there are property rights of the meagerest sort there is a constant pressure upon them. These are the Have-Nots, or Not-Enoughs. They Want.

Well, get in line, pal. We ALL Want and Adam Smith would tell you that Human Want is infinite. But nothing else is and whatever the moral superiority the commons system might enjoy, it doesn’t create any more territory and if it did, that territory would likewise be the object of dispute. Real estate, the private ownership of land is a slowly constructed layer of debts, laws and customs evolved to mitigate the monkey-grabbing and head-cracking that obtains in nature. The holdings in common are the quickest and surest way to return to that state as with common holdings there is no claim legally held above another so those most able to press their claims through strength, guile, deception or luck find themselves masters of all they can hold. It is a classic of human tragedy, The Tragedy of the Commons.  It repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats simply because the ignorant can recycle it to the credulous as a new idea.

It is the personal ownership of land that is the true innovation over the laws of the jungle which are not too far removed from the law of the commons or the law of the lord. For us it was practically born among the age of Lords and Ladies. Rome had melted from Britain and lawlessness poured in. Arthur’s father, Uther fought off other, less able warlords until he had the largest patch and called himself a King. He claimed all the land he could set foot on, as King’s are wont to do, but some of these holdouts were stubborn and threatened to make the fight cost more than the land was worth. He would leave them, as lesser Kings, so long as they paid up and knelt down. Once there were six or eight of these lesser Kings; palaver being more lucrative than battle, they would band together when one was threatened, understanding that their “rights” began and ended with their ability to assert them. Don’t think this had anything to do with a Common Man. Such a man, if he were not pressed into a private army, would be fortunate to live as a pig and could own only what was not taken from him. But slowly as peace made itself more attractive than strife, this curious notion of title and deed was extended to lesser and lesser Kings until A man’s home is his Castle applied even to the Common Man. Behold the foundation on which all the modern world has been built. This is the only way anyone can accumulate anything one could call a fortune or an estate. Any amount of gold or silver or weapons or clothing, commodities, furniture, victuals or livestock was chattel. Only the land was real estate.

To own land in this sense is to have a right to stand on a cone that extends from the center of the earth through the shape of your property lines and out into infinite space. No one owns property in this sense anymore. No, you do not own your airspace. You cannot forbid a plane or satellite nor charge them for passage. Likewise you probably cannot start drilling for oil in your backyard and if you did bring in a gusher you might well be arrested for stealing the crude someone else has claim to. We’ve surrendered much of the reality in our real estate. These, unlike the rights in the Declaration of Independence, did prove alienable. They have been sold away or abandoned to scavengers with gavels and pricey suits. And that is fine. Having a mineshaft in your garage could impact the other fellows property values, after all, but we must keep the kernel of it. Someone’s real estate gives them rights and privileges unknown elsewhere, however curtailed they have become but if there is no limit to that curtailment, always presented in millimeter-thin slices, then there are no rights nor privileges but a continued tax burden that somehow never stumbles.

When I bought my place, or pledged to buy it with borrowed money, I surrendered a princely sum it will take thirty years to pay, if I ever do. Condos, especially high-rise and exotic, are far more volatile than free-standing homes held outright. Our estate is a bit less real than the next fellows, being subject to a variety of covenants and practical restrictions reflected in the current predicament where units are selling at around half of what they were, and then not briskly. I claim no airspace or mineral rights if only because I would have to bore through someone else’s front-room to get to them and the neighbor’s drain may well back up into mine. But what I do hold, so long as common law real estate exists, is a line to withdraw behind, a platform to stand on that no one can legally remove. That is not to say that they cannot remove it, just that it will be a crime…. for whatever that is worth. What the Holdings in Common people want is to replace this wobbling, uncertain conception with a great simplicity: all will have a landlord and the government shall be he. Whatever good is inherent in real property as a concept will be preserved by electing folks with the proper mindset, most likely our noble selves! The responsibilities and benefits of ownership will be replaced with appeals to political institutions. Real property as a store of wealth? That will be a quaint anachronism but not for long. Those who can, will leverage their claims until property is again owned in all but name by a few influential individuals. They will extract more and more from their unfortunate tenants until they must revolt or die. Warlord will fight warlord until one has a patch large enough to call himself King. Or we could pay our notes to the best of our ability and take our foreclosures if we must. Perhaps then I could have my statues without a ruination of the landscape but either way works for me.

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