The Unbounded Home: Property Values Beyond Property Lines (Excerpts)

Abstract

The Unbounded Home grapples with a core modern reality - that the value and meaning of a home extend beyond its property lines to schools, shops, parks, services, neighbors, neighborhood aesthetics, and market conditions. The resulting tension between the homeowner’s desire for personal autonomy at home and the impulse to control everything that could affect the home’s value fuels continual conflict among neighbors and communities. The home’s unbounded nature carries implications for nearly every facet of residential life, from the financial vulnerability of homeowners to the persistence of segregation by race and class. This book shows how innovations that increase the flexibility of property law can address critical issues of neighborhood control and community composition that have been simmering unresolved for decades - and how homeownership itself can be reinvented to better deliver on its promises. The download provided here includes the table of contents and the following excerpts from the book: introduction, chapter one, and the opening pages of chapters four, six, and eight.