“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. that’s what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it… You’ll be stealing if you try to stay, you’ll be murderers if you kill to stay… We’re sorry, said the owner men… You’re on land that isn’t yours.”

From The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The American Naturalists and the Chinese Communists

Joy: I went by the house I grew up in the other day. My father built it, and there are pictures in a yellowed photo album of five-year-old me scrambling around the unfinished framing. I lost my first tooth in that house, waged epic water wars with my brother and our cousins up and down the driveway, and filled every corner of the yard with stories and invented worlds. I drove by the other day and peeked around a fence that I no longer had any right to enter; I could almost see my mother’s carefully cultivated rose garden. Some of it had been uprooted, though, and I heard from the neighbors that they turned my bedroom into a workout room. There was only so much I could see peering over the fence, toeing the line of trespassing on what was now ground belonging to someone else.

As children, my brother and I used to taunt each other, when we were swiping the other’s toys, that “possession is nine-tenths the law,” a phrase that we’d heard somewhere and parroted. Yet, what is ownership, really? Is it really only the law, the technical definition as determined by numbers on paper?

Jia Jia: As a Chinese military brat whose granddad was a Marxist scholar and whose parents have never owned a house, I find the concept of property ownership very arbitrary. Everything was collective back in the day and we were more preoccupied with getting food rations than sorting out property.

Persephone: Ownership is inherently intended to keep people out, to designate “this is mine, the boundary is here, it’s not yours, keep out,” albeit in a more subtle and insidious way. It’s just another form of division and exclusion and as a result makes us less open and receptive to each other. Which makes for an ungenerous and incohesive society.

Jia Jia: I guess my problem with land ownership is conceptual. You can claim land ownership all you want, but at the end of the day, no one owns it. The earth does, and the land will be there for millions of years after we’re extinct. Actually believing in ownership as some sort of universal right strikes me as existentially arrogant and naïve to the extreme. Incidentally, it also amuses me that superpowers are fighting over who owns space; property on the moon has already been bought—I mean, wtf?!

The urban pragmatists

Ahalya: I agree that, ideally, land should belong to nature and one shouldn’t even have to pay for space to exist. But, property is limited in supply, and basic economics dictates that you should have to pay a premium to own or rent that property.

Jia Jia: Actually, I’m going to backtrack. Thanks Ahalya for bringing the discussion down to practical realities. I completely like the option of being able to rent my own apartment wherever I am. I’ll complain about rich people in Manhattan driving up the rent, but hey, poorer people than me must wish I hadn’t come to the city. Think of all those old-time New Yorkers who’ve been driven out of their neighborhoods by decades of professionals coming in.

Severing the tie between land and the people on it

Joy: That’s  the problem isn’t it? The legal ownership of land and space is so often entirely separate from who develops it, knows it, and loves it. There’s a land rights movement in Brazil called Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra that tries to confront the alienation of people, labor, and land. They occupy some of the huge tracts of undeveloped land owned by foreign conglomerates, and apply for legal ownership and the right to develop it. On a smaller scale, it reminds me of the urban farming movement, reclaiming empty lots and turning unused private spaces into public farms for the community to grow vegetables in an inner-city food desert. The space belongs to those who live in it and those who shape it, in a real way but not in a legal way. Often, the cities tell them that they can’t. They tear up the gardens, whitewash the graffiti, reassert control and right of private ownership.

Jia Jia: I was furious to hear that the graffiti at Five Points in Queens was painted over. This is a classic case where the ownership of land becomes divorced from those whose identity and love are bound up with it. The building’s been owned by the same family since 1971, but over the decades, local artists have appropriated it for art and it’s become a cultural landmark, so for all intents and purposes, the art that came to own the building.

Joy: It makes me wonder if there is something of truth to a public ownership of space by the community invested in it, and something inherently false and oppressive about privatization. In a broad sense, as it’s enacted in the complexity of modern society, private ownership of space seems arbitrary and alienated from the truth of who has a right to a place.

The American dream—an ideal of freedom or an ideology of ownership?

Ahalya: Yet how else do you function in the complex societies that we operate in today, where community has lots of layers or is fragmented? Personally I find property ownership to be a really tangible way of deriving a sense of satisfaction. I don’t view it as a way of keeping people out; rather it’s a way for me to claim something I have rightfully purchased in the market with my hard-earned money, just like a new car or TV set. It all comes down to the benefits of making an investment; if you can invest your money today in an opportunity that will generate a return over time, why not do it? Owning a home is one of the best long-term investments you can make in most times.

Maybe I do subscribe to the American Dream, in that I enjoy living in a place I can call my home and that I can pass onto my family after me. It’s a fundamental part of my life and a piece of me.

Jia Jia: I suspect the American Dream is one part sound investment advice and nine parts ideology. If home-owning were such a guaranteed investment, we’d not have had the crisis of 2008. Of course, there are shrewd buyers out there but for the most part, I hear about people buying or selling homes in response to life events—needing to move, downsize or upsize—vs. as an investment strategy (unless you’re the super rich). As you say Ahalya, I think that people like the idea of owning something and passing it onto their family etc.

Joy: In the U.S. we tend to see private ownership of property as the just desserts of those who have worked hard and earned the inalienable right to their land. I saw a billboard the other day by Bank of the West declaring in large proud letters that there were still stakes to claim out West. They meant to invoke a mythology of empty open land to be occupied, worked, and claimed by right as private property. However, I read it with the historical truth in mind that all stakes “claimed” were taken from the indigenous people already living there and “privatized” by means of conquest.

In the Bay Area around the time of the gold rush there was a bounty per head to encourage prospectors to kill as many indigenous people as possible to “free up” the land.  Really, then as now, it all goes back to who has the power.

Governments have consistently been willing to acquisition “private” property if they need or want it for public use. Poor communities are consistently relocated to make space for dams, or freeways, or whatever, legal ownership or no.

In the long run, we are all dead.

Persephone: You don’t ever really own anything since you can’t take ANY of it with you when you die. The Anglo-Saxon/American obsession with owning land/property stems largely from the fear of death. That if you own a part of nature you’ll seemingly endure. That’s rubbish of course. Owning things has never immunized anyone from the misfortunes of life, least of all death.

I once read that Americans are the most afraid of dying, and that the busyness and crowdedness of American life—not to mention the obsession with looks and youth—stem from that.

So instead of improving our characters or our relations with those around us, our generation is beavering away to buy bricks and mortar—for the “luxury” of renting space to exist in for the rest of our harassed lives.

Joy: Really, we’re all just living on transient space and borrowed time. Private ownership is deeply illusory. It’s just the same as it always has been: you invest what you can into a space until fate or chance or someone with more power takes it from you.

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By Ahalya, Jia Jia, Joy and Persephone
Photograph of Banksy’s “No trespassing” by Steve Rhodes