Chinese customs and law have traditionally prevented a land seller from conveying outright title to a buyer. The ancient custom of dian, which persisted until the 1949 Revolution, gave a land seller and his lineage an immutable option to buy back sold land at the original sale price. This...

Since the 1970s a new vehicle for the provision of housing assistance - the mixed-income, or inclusionary, project - has flowered in the United States. In a community of this sort, the developer and its government benefactors designate a fraction of the dwelling units, typically between 10 and...

Only yesterday, all animals were wild. Zoological archaeologists assert that about 15,000 years ago, our hunter-gatherer forebears achieved the first domestication — the dog. Over the course of ensuing millennia, they proceeded to domesticate sheep, cattle, and other livestock. By the advent...

Most economists believe that strict rent controls deter the production and maintenance of rental housing. In a Métropolitiques essay, Loïc Bonneval challenged this consensus. Bonneval claimed that France’s severe interwar rent controls had little effect on the profitability of real estate...

Numerous policies encourage the preservation of open space in urban areas. Two of many examples are large-lot zoning and tax benefits to donors of conservation easements. These policies rest on the plausible inference that an open space can benefit nearby residents, for instance, by enhancing...

Commentators rightly decry the excessive segregation of American neighborhoods by race and social class. If all demographic groups were randomly distributed throughout a metropolitan area, however, there would be great diversity within each neighborhood, but no diversity among them. There is...

Murray Rothbard and other anarcho-capitalists would abolish all governments. Individuals instead would voluntarily subscribe to the services of one of a number of competing private protective associations. This vision is a pipe dream. Building on the ideas of small-government classical liberals...

Viewing property rights as a “bundle of sticks” can be descriptively clarifying because the law commonly entitles an owner of a particular resource to split up entitlements in it. Nonetheless, Thomas Merrill and Henry Smith, the most prominent critics of the metaphor, assert that this...