Housing derives from the account of [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) of aggregative liberty and collective investment, and from the identification of [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) of stable shelter as a participation condition the right to life already requires. Land is where those two results meet their hardest case: the one good in which a rival material asset and a non-rival structural value share a single object.

*Land is the rival good the aggregation has to face on its own terms.* The positive-sum result holds because what liberty aggregates across — latitude and modal depth — is non-rival, while the rival material goods that finance the floor are handled openly on the tax side. Land is the limiting case the distinction has to be run through directly, because in land the rival and the non-rival fall inside a single asset. The improvement a holder builds or maintains is contributed value, theirs on the section's own contribution logic. The site beneath it is not: its value is fixed in supply and produced almost entirely by the shared structure around it — the roads, transit, utilities, schools, and the simple presence of other people whose proximity makes the location worth holding — which is to say by collective investment ([§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>)) the holder did not make. Unimproved land value is therefore collective investment captured privately, the cleanest instance of the structural extraction [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) defines: a dividend drawn from the common scaffolding without proportionate contribution to it. The remedy is not imported from a school of policy; it is read straight off the definition. Value the shared structure created is recouped to the fund that created it, while the improvements the holder actually contributed are left untaxed: the land-value capture Henry George derived in *Progress and Poverty* (1879), reached here from the contribution-versus-extraction line rather than from George's own premises. The move does not strain the property tradition the chapter root engages; it satisfies it. The Lockean proviso that legitimate appropriation leave *enough and as good* for others is internal to the side-constraint reading, and under land scarcity the proviso binds rather than idles: capturing the community-created site value is what honors it. That a land-value levy falls on no contributed product is why even Friedman could call it the least bad tax: the rare point where the classical-liberal defense of the untaxed fruits of one's labor and the framework's anti-extraction result name the same policy.

*Housing is the spatial precondition the other conditions are exercised from.* Shelter already sits on the necessities list, so the subsistence floor already carries a housing floor; what the land result adds is why that floor is load-bearing in a way a line-item misses. The home is the reliable base from which nearly every other participation condition is taken up — reliable in continuity of access, safety, and address, not necessarily in permanence of place: a person without secure shelter cannot reliably hold the address representation runs through, get the rest healthcare presupposes, keep the base education and work are launched from, or hold the security under which any of it becomes choice rather than survival-response. Homelessness is the collapse of modal distance named at the economic register in [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>), in its most literal spatial form: action forced hard against necessity because there is nowhere to stand back from it. The structural reading therefore runs housing as maintained infrastructure rather than as a market outcome corrected after the fact, and the order of operations is shelter first, on the same logic by which prevention dominates correction at the chapter root.

*Exclusion is how a fixed supply becomes foreclosure.* Because land cannot be made more of, the standing relation that organizes access to it carries the domination register the chapter root locates anywhere standing relations are organized. Land-use control is where it concentrates: exclusionary zoning, minimum-lot and single-use rules, and the supply restriction incumbents impose convert a fixed stock into the active foreclosure of others' access, raising the holders' site value by the same act that closes the location to newcomers: extraction and exclusion performed in one move.

The historical record already sits here at its sharpest: FHA and HOLC redlining (1930s–1968), urban-renewal demolition, and the racial sorting of residential geography developed at [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>) are the land register of the extraction the framework reads on its own logic, and the reparative-obligation question they raise routes to [§9.13](<9.13 Justice.md>). The communitarian point that home and place are constitutive of a life, not commodities a person merely holds (the constitutive-community engagement the chapter root grants to Sandel and MacIntyre), is conceded in full and tells the other way: it grounds the security of tenure the floor protects, and parts from the framework only where attachment to place is turned into a warrant for shutting others out.

*Security of tenure is indexed to access, not to place.* The floor this section derives protects non-precarity — protection from arbitrary eviction, foreclosure, or removal — not permanence of location, so an arrangement that reconstitutes at a sequence of sites rather than holding one in perpetuity meets the requirement wherever access at the site currently held is secure for as long as the arrangement holds it, on the same standard a fixed dwelling meets. The portable, person-attached allowance [§9.8.2](<9.8.2 What is Required.md>) requires is already built to travel with an arrangement of this kind rather than assuming a fixed address to attach to. Read this way, the historical targeting of Traveller, Romani, and other itinerant communities through location-fixation requirements is the domination register this section locates in zoning and exclusion, run instead against the fact of movement itself.

What remains open is the form: the rate and base of land-value capture, the transition path for households whose savings are held as home equity (an installation problem [§9.15](<9.15 Installation.md>) takes up, not an objection to the result), and the specific zoning and tenure designs through which the floor and the anti-exclusion constraint are met. Where several designs satisfy them the choice stays open; where a design manufactures scarcity to capture the site value the community created, the argument precludes it.

*The anti-displacement principle.* Site-value capture is money the collective structure creates and is entitled to recoup; the person who currently lives on the land did not create that value and must never be forced to hand over cash they do not have, or vacate a home they occupy, because of it. The precise mechanisms — deferral-until-transfer with bounding guardrails, community land trusts, the portable provision-cost-indexed allowance, and the joint governor that prevents capture — are the structural-necessity inventory [§9.8.2](<9.8.2 What is Required.md>) derives.


- [9.8.1 What is Disputed](<9.8.1 What is Disputed.md>)
- [9.8.2 What is Required](<9.8.2 What is Required.md>)
- [9.8.3 What is Predicted](<9.8.3 What is Predicted.md>)
- [9.8.4 What is Confirmed](<9.8.4 What is Confirmed.md>)
- [9.8.5 What is Concluded](<9.8.5 What is Concluded.md>)


---

← [9.7.5 What is Concluded](<9.7.5 What is Concluded.md>) | [9.8.1 What is Disputed](<9.8.1 What is Disputed.md>) →
