If people don’t own the land, then it follows that houses should not be owned by people.
This seems to make some questionable assumptions about the relationship of immovable property to land. I’ve heard of traditional systems of tenure where people don’t own land per se, but have claim to it insofar as they modify it or build structures upon it: you couldn’t own a square mile of wilderness, for example, but you could own a house or a cultivated field.
This tends to work better in a society that runs on small-scale agriculture, where a single mode of cultivation is about all land ever gets used for, and where the amount of land you can cultivate is limited by the livestock and tools you own and the number of workers you have access to (either hired or part of your family). It’d be difficult to extend to modern land use. But it is an internally consistent way of thinking about tenure.
This seems to make some questionable assumptions about the relationship of immovable property to land.
Actually, the issue is with the word “own”, or, rather, with the concept of property.
Property isn’t a binary yes/no thing. The usual way of describing property is as a “bundle of rights”. In different times and places that bundle may and does contain different numbers of different rights.
For example, a basic property right is the right to exclude. You can (usually) prevent other people from using your property without your consent. Another property right is the right to destroy. Etc. etc.
That’s another issue, yes—and models of land ownership and tenure have historically been pretty varied in terms of the rights they confer. (For a simple example, consider the concept of right of way.) But you don’t need to start breaking property rights down here to get the cracks to show.
This seems to make some questionable assumptions about the relationship of immovable property to land. I’ve heard of traditional systems of tenure where people don’t own land per se, but have claim to it insofar as they modify it or build structures upon it: you couldn’t own a square mile of wilderness, for example, but you could own a house or a cultivated field.
This tends to work better in a society that runs on small-scale agriculture, where a single mode of cultivation is about all land ever gets used for, and where the amount of land you can cultivate is limited by the livestock and tools you own and the number of workers you have access to (either hired or part of your family). It’d be difficult to extend to modern land use. But it is an internally consistent way of thinking about tenure.
Actually, the issue is with the word “own”, or, rather, with the concept of property.
Property isn’t a binary yes/no thing. The usual way of describing property is as a “bundle of rights”. In different times and places that bundle may and does contain different numbers of different rights.
For example, a basic property right is the right to exclude. You can (usually) prevent other people from using your property without your consent. Another property right is the right to destroy. Etc. etc.
That’s another issue, yes—and models of land ownership and tenure have historically been pretty varied in terms of the rights they confer. (For a simple example, consider the concept of right of way.) But you don’t need to start breaking property rights down here to get the cracks to show.