Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2765

Typed drafts of letter from Heath at 11 Waverly Place, New York City 3, to Robert W. Dowling, 25 Broad Street, New York City, regarding real estate in general and “Progress & Poverty Reviewed and Its Fallacies Exposed.” One marked in pencil, “Rewritten,” the other presumably sent. [Look at originals to confirm the date.]

May 28, 1955

 

Dear Mr. Dowling:

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 a large and prosperous clientele — making money by serving others abundant­ly and well. Good land administration, then, consists in its owner or owners making it more serviceable to present or prospective occupants. There are two ways of doing this; the one obvious and usual, 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, and especially in the providing of 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 any or to 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 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, having come into power, their bureaucrats control the sources of production, they control and administer everything else as well.

     Those real estate owners who are most intelligent and most enter­prising 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 absolutely essential services to society that site 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 the neces­sity of private property in land and in behalf of sound advances in real estate administration.

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

Very sincerely yours,