The Unbounded Home:
Property Values Beyond Property Lines
Yale University Press, 2009
Rights Reverted to Author on July 13, 2023
FULL TEXT / REVIEWS / RELATED WORK
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 implicates 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.
Reviews
William A. Fischel, The Evolution of Homeownership, 77 University of Chicago Law Review 1503 (2010)
Nicole Stelle Garnett, Unbundling Homeownership: Regional Reforms From the Inside Out, 119 Yale Law Journal 1904 (2010).
Amnon Lehavi, Is Law Unbounded? Property Rights and Control of Social Groupings, 35 Law & Social Inquiry 517 (2010).
“Cap-and-trade markets for lawn gnomes, calls and puts for plastic flamingos, and fragmented rights to noisy lawnmowers are just some of the colorful applications of economic modeling to residential property ownership found in The Unbounded Home. Professor Lee Anne Fennell examines the current legal framework’s inadequacies with respect to today’s interdependent metropolitan neighborhoods and proposes some innovative solutions. True to Chicago School form, the book introduces readers to such familiar analytic tools as the tragedy of the commons and the prisoners’ dilemma, illustratively applying them to the residential property context. While these concepts may be familiar to many readers, the analysis that follows is strikingly original. Professor Fennell argues persuasively for a more fluid conception of residential property ownership, a system in which homeowners, neighbors, and communities can more easily buy and sell their rights to neighborhood aesthetics and to individual homes’ property values. Students and scholars of property, land use, and municipal government law will benefit from this volume’s creative ideas, and anyone with an interest in law and economics will profit from the book’s entertaining and informative examples.”
— 123 Harvard Law Review 1059 (2010)
“This challenging but highly readable book addresses one of the fundamental tensions in modern American homeownership: the conflict that every homeowner faces between the desire for complete personal freedom in his or her own home and the collective urge to control the land use of everyone else. This tension, writes Prof. Fennell, proceeds from the little-acknowledged but important fact that the value of every home derives not only from the quality, location, and condition of the real property itself, but also from the entire environment–neighborhood, schools, public services, and market conditions. The first chapters examine this “unbounded” nature of homeownership in the context of some of the classic theoretical constructs such as externalities, the Tiebout hypothesis, and the tragedy of the commons. In this analysis the book provides a new take on some of the insights addressed by William A. Fischel in The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation, School Finance, and Land-Use Policies (2001). Prof. Fennell extends the discussion to consider reforms that could increase flexibility in property rules that govern community control of land use. Her central innovation is the suggestion to reconfigure the concept of residential property ownership in a way that separates the homeowner’s “bundle of rights” in the real property from the off-site factors that influence volatility in market value. Toward this goal she proposes the development of new forms of transferable entitlements in aesthetic effects. Prof. Fennell’s book makes an important contribution to the literature of property theory and will also be a very interesting and accessible read for practitioners.”
— Probate & Property (January/February 2010)
Related Work
Homeownership 2.0, 102 Northwestern Univ. L. Rev. 1047 (2008)
Exclusion’s Attraction: Land Use Controls in Tieboutian Perspective, in The Tiebout Model at Fifty: Essays in Public Economics in Honor of Wallace Oates 163 (William Fischel, ed.) (2006)
Properties of Concentration, 73 U. Chi L. Rev. 1227 (2006)
Revealing Options, 118 Harv. L. Rev. 1399 (2005)
Common Interest Tragedies, 98 Northwestern U. L. Rev. 907 (2004), reprinted in Vol II., Commons and Anticommons 5 (Michael Heller, ed., 2009).
Contracting Communities, 2004 U. Ill. L. Rev. 829 (2004)
Homes Rule, 112 Yale L.J. 617 (2002) (review of William A. Fischel, The Homevoter Hypothesis (2001))
Beyond Exit and Voice: User Participation in the Production of Local Public Goods, 80 Texas L. Rev. 1 (2001)