Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?
Imagine you own land subject to a restrictive covenant. The restrictive covenant might actually have positive value to you – if the entire neighbourhood has a restrictive covenant prohibiting certain land uses, that gives your neighbourhood a character, people are willing to pay for the character the covenant enforces – maybe the existence of the covenant was actually a factor in convincing you to purchase this specific property. Suppose a legislative change invalidates the covenant – that's the government taking away from your land something you value about it. Isn't that an expropriation?
And I don't think there is a fundamental logical difference between a restrictive covenant on the title, and zoning as a government-imposed land use regulation. Some buyers choose a property because of its zoning, its zoning is something they know about and value; if the government changes the zoning, and that takes away from their property something they valued about it, isn't that an expropriation?
Note, I'm not arguing that removal of zoning and restrictive covenants is always wrong – maybe sometimes it is the right thing to do, all things considered. I'm simply arguing against the position "land use limitation = expropriation, removal of it = not expropriation" – even if something is expropriation, sometimes expropriation is justifiable
And if you just buy a property and don't actually make this agreement, I definitely don't see a problem with abolishing it. We're talking about the government telling you what you can do with your land, and then stopping doing that.
If there was already a zoning or restrictive covenant, and you knew about that when you bought the land – then the ability to do with the land what that zoning or covenant prohibits is not part of the rights to the land you acquired, and the enforcement of that zoning/covenant isn't denying you any of the rights you paid for.
Besides that, private property is (almost always) a creation of the government. [0] I own a house. If I trace the chain of land titles, it ultimately ends in a government land grant; the government got it by stealing it from the Indigenous people. The government land grant was issued on the condition of obeying the government's laws as in force from time-to-time. You can't sell what you don't own; the original land grant recipient didn't own the land independent of that condition, so none of the subsequent purchasers could either. So the government restricting my ability to use the land I purchased isn't an infringement of any of the rights I actually paid for.
[0] I live in Australia; under Australian law, "native title" is considered to pre-exist Australia's current British-imposed system of governance, but all other land titles derive their legal existence from being created by that system; I don't think the situation in the US is fundamentally different, all non-Indigenous US land titles derive from action of the state or federal governments, or the colonial governments, or the Mexican or Spanish or French or Dutch or Russian or Hawaiian governments
I live ten blocks from a neighborhood in Portland called Laurelhurst. Laurelhurst sits on a hill, about 30 blocks east of downtown, and contains the largest 100-year-old mansions east of the river. At each main entrance to Laurelhurst, there are massive stone archways. The arches were built to define the points where Black people were not allowed to enter after sundown.
This is not the case today.
Speaking as someone whose Dad grew up in segregated Baltimore, my grandfather was a bar owner who wasn't even allowed to own or work at a bar in the white neighborhoods. They couldn't rent or buy a house in the white neighborhoods.
The situation today has nothing in common with that. We own homes and businesses wherever we want to. Fold up your manufactured guilt and sympathy and take it elsewhere, we didn't need your help and we still don't.
Also just as an interesting historical oddity, here is a map of home deeds in Chicago that still have (obviously illegal and unenforceable) racial covenants. Including tons in the Washington park neighborhood made famous by Raisin in the Sun!
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/32c7a747127e46dda11...
This is not ancient history.
I'm not saying I oppose abolishing either racially restrictive covenants or single family zoning. On the contrary, I support the abolition of the former, and am open-minded about the abolition of the latter.
What I'm opposing is particular arguments to those conclusions – what one might call libertarian(-adjacent) arguments – not the conclusions themselves.
I think, a legal right to racially homogenous neighbours is a property right, and taking it away was an expropriation of property – but an expropriation I support. And I don't think one is always owed compensation for such expropriations either. Legally speaking, not all "regulatory takings" are entitled to compensation; and I'm unconvinced the answer is different if we look at that question through a moral lens rather than a legal one.
So, between 1926 and 1948, there was a US Supreme Court case upholding racially restrictive covenants. There were also many state court cases reaching the same conclusion. So yes, the US courts had reviewed them and found them to be legally binding.
Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.
> Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.
Yeah, this is more what I was wondering about in my comment above. You had mentioned the idea of a "legal right to racially homogenous neighbours", and I was curious if that was actually an explicit legal right at any point rather than just something that in practice people did without getting into trouble. It sounds like there were a couple decades where it was explicitly a legal right, and then another couple decades after where it was in the "implicitly allowed despite not being considered legal" territory (and presumably for an indefinite period beforehand was also basically allowed, just without the definitive legal ruling on it).
To clarify, I didn't expect that you were wrong by using that phrasing earlier; I just had no clue either way, and it seemed like it might be useful context for the discussion either way.
Under English real estate law, while there are some constraints on your ability to make covenants, the rules are quite broad. A century ago, racial discrimination wasn't illegal or clearly contrary to public policy in most common law jurisdictions – indeed, many of them had explicitly racially discriminatory laws on the statute book – so racially restrictive covenants weren't obviously disallowed. The US, with its constitutional prohibition on discrimination in the 14th Amendment, was actually the only common law country in which there was a decent argument they weren't legal – but SCOTUS rejected that argument at first, then changed its mind over 20 years later. In the 1945 case Re Drummond Wren, the Ontario High Court ruled them illegal – but it cited the just signed United Nations Charter as grounds for doing so.
I bought my house with a close neighbor because I know the neighbor can’t build a steel mill in their backyard. If the government comes in and says we’re all free now to build steel mills, that gain in freedom is a loss in value for me.
It’s no different from buying a house with a great tree in the neighbor’s yard, and then they cut it down. Was that part of the value of the house to you? Yep. Was there a promise that it would stay there forever? Nope. Is cutting it down expropriation? Nope. Should you have assumed it would be there forever? Absolutely not.
Here's where Georgism gets clever: The initial Georgism says that land should be taxed up to the value of its land-rent. Some progressive people said, well, that means the landlord wouldn't make any money anyway, so the government should just take (expropriate) the land. George said, basically, no. Let the landlord decide if it's worth it for them to keep the freehold.
Then, there are varieties of Georgism that disagree about whether the government should be allowed to tell you anything at all about what to do with your property. Some say you should be able to do anything on it. Others say not.
When I bought my house, across from an elementary school, I knew I didn't have a right to drill oil on it, or to build a factory making solid rocket boosters and dumping perchlorates in the basement.
That's all written into the code governing the land before you buy it. The Georgist question is: If I'm paying 100% tax on this land's rent value, does that mean I get to despoil it any way I want? Or do some rules apply?
That's a separate and more nuanced question; the answer is probably that the same rules would apply as do now, but that doesn't equate with expropriation.
I have no idea what georgists would say about that. My guess is that being a the holder of such land would work as luxury/status-signal because you are only incurring the cost of the land and no/low revenues from it