Privatizing the Neighborhood: A Proposal to Replace Zoning with Private Collective Property Rights to Existing Neighborhoods
![handle is hein.journals/gmlr7 and id is 837 raw text is: 1999]
PRIVATIZING THE NEIGHBORHOOD: A PROPOSAL TO
REPLACE ZONING WITH PRIVATE COLLECTIVE
PROPERTY RIGHTS TO EXISTING NEIGHBORHOODS
Robert H. Nelson*
INTRODUCTION
Two researchers recently announced a quiet revolution in the struc-
ture of community organization, local government, land-use control, and
neighbor relations in the United States.' They were referring to the spread
of homeowners' associations, condominium ownership of property, and
other forms of collective private ownership of residential property. In de-
scribing these forms of ownership, different commentators have used
terms such as residential community association, common interest
community, residential private government, gated community and
others. Whatever term is best-and I will refer to such ownerships as
neighborhood associations in this Article, recognizing that some collec-
tive ownerships are smaller than the average neighborhood, and others are
larger-the spread of collective private ownership of residential property
is a development of fundamental importance in the history of property
rights in the United States.
Indeed, it may yet prove to have as much social significance as the
spread of the corporate form of collective ownership of private business
property in the second half of the nineteenth century. At that time, a new
ease of transportation, economies of scale in mass production, improved
management techniques of business coordination, and other business inno-
vations led American industry to operate at a new scale, and corporate
ownership proved financially and otherwise advantageous. Thus, although
there were few business corporations before the Civil War, by 1900 corpo-
rations produced almost two-thirds of U.S. manufacturing output, a figure
that reached 95% in the 1960s.2 In 1932, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means
announced the transformation of the basic relationship between private
Professor, School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland; Senior Fellow in Environmental
Studies, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C. This article is based upon a paper pre-
sented at the Donner Conference on Freedom of Contract in Property Law, sponsored by the Law and
Economics Center, George Mason University School of Law, December 1997.
1 Stephen E. Barton & Carol J. Silverman, Preface to COMMON INTEREST COMMUNITIES at xi (S.
Barton aid C. Silverman eds., 1994) [hereinafter BARTON & SILVERMAN].
2 See Economic Concentration, Part 1-OveraU and Conglomerate Services, Hearings before the
Subcommittee on Antiwust and Monopoly of the Senate Connittee on the Judiciary, 88th Cong. 12, 15
(1964) (statement of Gardiner C. Means).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/gmlr7&div=37&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Privatizing the Neighborhood: A Proposal to Replace Zoning with Private Collective Property Rights to Existing Neighborhoods
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