This land was (not) made for you and me

In the United States, school-aged children learn Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, although they’re not taught every verse of this beloved folk song. It is customary to only learn the first four verses, the ones lauding the physical virtues of the country, from the ‘red wood forest’ to the ‘sparkling sands of her diamond deserts’. The less upbeat final verses describe the lines at the relief office in the shadow of the steeple. They also contain one of the few popular expressions of common property—a sign the wandering narrator encounters that says ‘“No Trespassing”; But on the other side it didn’t say nothing; That side was made for you and me’.

Brett Christophers ponders the paucity of property held in common or, more precisely, owned by the state in ‘the neoliberal era’. Although Christophers focuses on the privatization of publicly owned land in the United Kingdom in the postwar era, he sets himself up as the rightful heir to Karl Polanyi’s project analyzing post-feudal processes of enclosure. Like the Spanish Inquisition, enclosure (‘a revolution of the rich against the poor’) was not a discrete period; instead it was a lengthy process, unfolding through laws and private contracts put in force over a period of time roughly spanning the 12th through the 19th centuries. Polanyi was interested in how the dissolution of the traditional rights of commoners to use open fields and waste land regardless of title created the structure and precedent for capitalist production and urbanization. Unable to make a livelihood farming the enclosed land, commoners moved to cities and supplied the labor power for the industrial revolution.

In Christopher’s contemporary case, the public sector acquired land for the purposes of public services, conservation, and use by national agencies and local councils. Its holdings were amassed as the welfare state developed more power and legitimacy in the early 20th century. Ambitious interventions in the wake of World War I led to the subsidized resettlement of peri-urban land owned by the aristocracy and to the purchase of urban land for social housing construction. By the start of World War II, approximately 10% of households in the United Kingdom were renting from the state. War justified the use of public police powers to appropriate private property, engage in slum removal, and produce housing for veterans and the other members of the ‘deserving poor’, much like it did in the United States with Urban Renewal. Subsequent planning initiatives—for infrastructure and new towns—put more land in public sector’s hands. According to Christophers, the postwar welfare state managed its inventory wisely, adopting technocratic methods to encourage cost-effective use oriented toward the public goals to which each agency was held.

The neoliberal revolution of the 1980s saw the state radically reversing course, selling off its holdings en masse to private owners and developers. It is a story of ‘accumulation through dispossession’ but where tenants are evicted and the government ends up accumulating very little. Instead rentiers make out like bandits, the central government falls on its own sword to prove a point, and working people go into debt to make up for austerity policies. The epilogue of the story for Polanyi was the industrial revolution and the class conflict that ensued. The new enclosure described by Christophers has also intensified inequality, albeit one that is more asset- instead of income-based.

Like Polanyi, Christophers nimbly denaturalizes the private market for land. Polanyi had described property markets as ‘perhaps the weirdest of all the undertakings of our ancestors’ because land’s abstraction and commodification causes such harm to the social and economic life in which it is embedded (Polanyi, in Christophers p. 65). Christophers helps us see the ‘weirdness’ and politically constructed nature of ‘surplus’ property. Accusations of surplus are a common attack on the state and fuse together several strands of neoliberal thought superficially valorizing market behavior. Publicly owned assets are depicted as wasted, public agencies are perceived as hoarding unnecessarily, and market actors are built up as the only ones capable of unlocking value. Because only private owners can put publicly owned land to productive (i.e. capitalist) use, the logic goes, that land should be sold off (or even given) to them.

It’s not hard to make such a case when the remit of government is unstable and subject to the changing vagaries of politics. If the boundaries of the public sphere are redrawn more narrowly, a layer of former state obligations will fall into the category of ‘surplus’. If the state is shrunk through austerity, facilities will be, by definition, underutilized. If the legitimacy of the local councils to provide housing is challenged, then their vast holdings will be viewed in a pejorative manner—no matter how well-managed. Or as Christopher’s cleverly states, ‘Public land becomes surplus as the inevitable outcome of the state’s determination to downsize itself’ (p. 148).

My own research on school closures in the United States see echoes of these discursive strategies and logics (Weber et al., 2018). Challenged for providing poor education, public school districts and city governments encouraged the creation of quasi-private ‘charter’ schools in the 2000s that, without public sector unions, were perceived as being more efficient and responsive to student needs. In the years following the roll-out of these privatized options, administrators began raising concerns about the ‘underutilization’ of public schools—especially those whose best students had been creamed by nearby charters. School districts developed methods of calculating utilization from afar so that the unique design of each school building could be inventoried and abstracted, compared to others, and ranked. They set targets for utilization that did not take into account student performance, special education needs, and the countervailing pedagogical arguments for smaller classrooms.

It is no wonder that the ratio of students to building square footage shrinks when other options are promoted. It is no surprise that local school districts, starved of funds from central and state governments and told to raise their own revenues, turned toward asset disposal strategies and decided to close schools in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago. Nonetheless concepts like surplus and utilization were seen as qualities intrinsic to the assets, a failure of the school facilities themselves, and not as resulting from changing ideologies or policy contexts.

Concepts like surplus and utilization justified the sale and consolidation of the public’s holdings. When the Chicago Public Schools closed 49 schools in 2013, it tasked a committee of real estate brokers and civic leaders to help sell the schools to the highest bidders, privileging private purchasers over alternative public uses. Because of the polarization of land values in a racially and economically segregated city like Chicago, those schools located in high-value markets were converted into condominiums and market-rate apartments. The majority, though, were located in African-American neighborhoods that had experienced population decline, and for these, take up by the private sector has been slow. As in the cases Christophers describes, there is a tendency for administrators to imagine a strong market waiting to snatch up these assets immediately once they are released from inept public ownership and management. The public sector does not imagine ‘the market’ as racially discriminatory, speculative, or profligate hoarders.

It may still be too early to say but the cost savings from closing underutilized schools were minimal even while the negative dislocating effects were felt by the most vulnerable students and families in the city. Meanwhile, school districts that closed schools continue to struggle with budget deficits and accusations of low-quality services. If demographic trends reverse and there is a growth in school-age children, it is likely the school district will say it has no funds to build new schools. For Christophers, the concern is housing affordability—if only local councils still owned the land, they might be able to more effectively plan for the future, construct new units, or, if they retained the land but sold or leased the appurtenances, control the amount of appreciation over time. They might also allow community members more meaningful say in matters of urban development, instead of shutting them out of decisions that affect the quality of their lives.

Privatization threatens the survival of those spaces tasked with social reproduction. I worry about the future of public education, while Christophers mourns the loss of playing fields and council flats. For the state, relinquishing land means giving up power and leverage—which plays right in to the long game of neoliberalism.