Property and Democracy in America
23rd September 2019
From Jefferson and Madison’s republic of yeoman farmers to the suburban homeowners of the postwar era, the notion of dispersed property ownership shaped our democracy. The founders understood the role of small property owners in ancient Athens and the Roman Republic, as well as contemporary examples in such places as the Netherlands. Those who own something — a house, a farm, a small business — tend to be far more engaged with their communities than those who rent or work merely for wages.
This era may now be coming to an end. In the United States, the proportion of land owned by the nation’s 100 largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017. In 2007, according to the Land Report, this group owned a combined 27 million acres of land — holdings larger than the entirety of New England.