The open question on housing and land is what a political community may do with land whose value is fixed in supply and produced by the shared structure around it, and whether zoning and tenure arrangements that exclude newcomers from that land are a legitimate exercise of property and community self-governance or a structural-extraction-and-foreclosure mechanism the framework derives against. The framework's structural reading treats land as the hard case where a rival material asset (the site) and a non-rival structural value (housing as the spatial precondition of participation) share a single object. Land-value capture is the mechanism that recoups the community-created component while leaving contributed improvement untaxed. Exclusionary land-use control is the structural-extraction-and-foreclosure failure mode the framework derives against. The anti-displacement transition mechanism is the answer to the installation problem the capture otherwise raises. Three traditions in property theory and land-use governance deny this framing at its premise from different directions.

The propertarian entitlement tradition (Nozick, *Anarchy, State, and Utopia* 1974; Rothbard, *For a New Liberty* 1973; Epstein, *Takings* 1985) presses the legitimacy claim from one direction: legitimate title, once justly acquired through purchase, inheritance, or first appropriation meeting the Lockean proviso, extends to the parcel as a whole, and a levy on unimproved site value is a taking of the holder's property on the same footing as a levy on any other justly-held asset, whatever collective-investment story is told about how the site came to be valuable. The framework's site/improvement distinction, on this reading, manufactures a division the entitlement itself does not recognize: what the market values, the market values as one thing, and confiscating a share of it on the ground that part of the value was collectively produced would license confiscating a share of any asset whose value depends on infrastructure, network effects, or a favorable regulatory environment, which is to say nearly everything.

The homevoter local-control tradition (Fischel, *The Homevoter Hypothesis* 2001, and the broader municipal-finance and local-public-goods literature) presses the claim from a second direction: local land-use control is not an incidental feature of municipal governance but the mechanism by which homeowners, whose wealth is concentrated and undiversified in a single illiquid asset, protect that asset's value against negative externalities, and zoning is the instrument that makes local self-governance answerable to the people who bear the costs of decline. On this reading, exclusionary zoning is not extraction dressed as governance; it is what democratic control over land use looks like when the electorate is composed of people with a durable stake in the outcome, and a framework that precludes the instrument precludes the self-governance.

The land-decommodification tradition (Engels, *The Housing Question* 1872; Harvey, *Social Justice and the City* 1973 and *Rebel Cities* 2012; the broader Marxist urban-political-economy literature) presses the claim from a third direction: any arrangement in which land and housing remain individually held and transacted at market price, however the tax base is drawn, reproduces the rent relation that is the structural core of the extraction, because the holder still captures a use-value monopoly over a fixed resource and still stands to gain from appreciation the collective structure produces. Land-value capture on this reading is a redistributive adjustment to the rent relation, not an answer to it; the adjustment leaves the commodity form (land as an asset an individual holds, transacts, and profits from) fully in place, and only de-privatization of land itself, with housing allocated through use-rights rather than through market tenure, answers the structural diagnosis the framework's own collective-investment logic implies.

A fourth pressure runs inside the framework's own communitarian engagement rather than against its premise. Sandel (*Democracy's Discontent* 1996) and MacIntyre (*After Virtue* 1981) press the constitutive-community reading that home and place are constitutive of a life rather than commodities a person merely holds, from a direction that is largely convergent with the framework's security-of-tenure protections; the residual pressure is whether attachment to place can ground a community's standing to exclude newcomers whose presence would alter that place's character, a claim the framework grants as felt experience and precludes as a warrant for foreclosing others' access to a fixed resource whose value the excluded newcomers themselves help produce merely by wanting to live there.

The dispute the section frames is whether land is an ordinary asset whose full value belongs to its titled holder (the propertarian reading), a local public good properly governed by the people whose wealth it constitutes (the homevoter reading), or a resource whose commodity form is itself the extraction and must be abolished rather than adjusted (the decommodification reading) — theses pressed by Nozick-through-Epstein, by Fischel and the municipal-finance literature, and by Engels-through-Harvey — or whether land is the hard case in which a rival site and a non-rival structural value share one object, with capture of the site value and preclusion of exclusionary foreclosure as the framework's structural answer, a thesis pressed by the Georgist land-value-capture lineage (George, *Progress and Poverty* 1879), the classical-liberal convergence on land taxation (Friedman's "least bad tax" remark, 1978), the fair-housing and anti-redlining record (developed at [§9.2](<9.2 Belonging.md>)), and the community-land-trust and inclusionary-zoning empirical literatures. On both registers the dispute is answered at [§9.8.2](<9.8.2 What is Required.md>), where the structural-necessity derivation reads off the [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) collective-investment logic and the [§9.1](<9.1 Rights.md>) shelter-as-participation-condition result what housing and land-use architecture must deliver to count as housing and land-use architecture rather than as extraction and foreclosure at the point of a fixed and non-substitutable resource. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.8 Housing](<9.8 Housing.md>) | [9.8.2 What is Required](<9.8.2 What is Required.md>) →
