Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1483

Letter to Charles F. Noyes, 119 East 55th Street, New York 22, New York

May 28, 1953

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Noyes:

 

     You may recall my endeavor some time ago to interest you in an important side — the public or community side — of land or site administration.

     The good conduct of any business, as you know, consists in causing its products or its properties to best serve the needs or desires of the largest possible clientele — making money by serving others abundantly and well. Good land administration, then, consists in its owner or owners making it most serviceable to present or prospective occu­pants. There are two ways of doing this; the one obvious and common, the other less obvious, but vastly potential for gain.

     The first is by way of improvements made directly upon and serving none but the particular site and its occupants. (In a pioneer community land owners make im­provements for their own-use; in a highly developed econ­omy they make and maintain them for the use of others.

     The second way consists in making improvements, in­cluding intangible benefits, not just on a single site but appurtenant to several or many sites in common, instead of one site exclusively.

     For want of site owners jointly making improvements or amenities that are common to many or all of their pro­perties, community improvement continues under political jurisdiction and political administration, with all that such implies. The fault in this is that political improve­ments, not being made or managed with a view to revenue from them, for profit or gain, cost, in general, more than they are worth, and so do not increase the value of the total properties that they improve. Not only do improve­ments so made not increase realty values; they at last (as in all history) destroy them.

     Land reform, so called, is always more taxes on land. It is the Trojan horse of the land communists; and when, as bureaucrats, they control the sources of production they control and administer all. Those among real estate owners who are most enterprising and intelligent need to take effective action in defense of their properties and values. This they can do, on the one hand, by exposing the basic fallacies of the land communists and, on the other hand, by discovering the obviously essential services to society that land owners unknowingly perform and for which they are automatically recompensed with ground rent.

     The accompanying printed essay, “Progress and Poverty Reviewed and its Fallacies Exposed,” is sound material for long steps in both these directions. Already it has drawn blood. It has provoked such furor among the land communists, both here and abroad that the present editor of the Freeman magazine (succeeding my friend John Cham­berlain) without objection to its form or content, refuses to further publish or distribute it.

     Herewith is a copy of this essay and a sample of the advertising copy employed in its distribution. For your convenient reference I send also a copy of the “masterpiece” whose argument it now exposes and destroys.

     I am able, even eager, to spend liberally both money and time in the interest of public enlightenment as to the function and necessity of private property in land and in behalf of sound advances in real estate administration.

     May I have your encouragement and perhaps your even further assistance (not financial) in this?

                        Very sincerely yours,