VI.
One of the most striking fields of municipal enterprise is the policy of Land Purchase. The people were encouraged to enter on this policy by the evils of private land speculation, and by the shocking housing conditions in some of the big cities, and especially in Berlin, where the curse of the barrack system still prevails.
Nearly every German city is an important landowner, owning on an average 50 per cent. of the municipal area.
“While the powers of English urban districts in relation to land ownership are severely restricted by law, German towns are free to buy real estate on any scale whatever, without permission of any kind, unless, indeed, the contracting of a special loan should be necessary, in which event the assent of the City Commissary is necessary. This assent, however, entails no local inquiry corresponding to the inquiries of the Local Government Board, simply because the German States have no Local Government Board, and no use for them; the proceeding is almost a formality, intended to remind the communes that the State, though devolved upon them their wide powers of self-government, likes still to be consulted now and then, and it is arranged expeditiously through the post. For, strange as it may sound to English ears, the Governments of Germany, without exception, far from wishing to hamper the towns in their land investments, have often urged the towns to buy as much land as possible and not to sell” (Dawson, p. 123).
“Within the present year the little town of Kalbe, on the Saale, expended just £14 a head on its 12,000 inhabitants in buying for £468,000 a large estate for the purpose of creating a number of smallholdings and labourers’ allotments. During the period 1880 to 1908 Breslau expended over one million and a half pounds in the purchase of land within the communal area. Berlin has an estate more than three times greater than its administrative area. In 1910 alone seventy-three of the large towns of Germany bought land to the aggregate extent of 9,584 acres and to the aggregate value of over four million pounds sterling. Charlottenburg now owns 2,500 acres of land as yet not built upon, with a value of over a million and a quarter pounds, and the value of all its real estate is about four and a half million pounds sterling. In 1886 Freiburg, in Baden, owned nearly 11,000 acres of land with a value of £925,000. In 1909 its estate was only 2,000 acres larger, but its value was then £2,300,000.”
“Since 1891 Ulm, under the rule of a mayor convinced of the wisdom of a progressive land policy and strong enough to carry it out, has bought some 1,280 acres of land at different times for £316,000, while it has sold 420 acres for £406,000, showing a cash profit of £900,000, apart from the addition of 860 acres to the town estate. As a result of Ulm’s land policy, its assets increased between 1891 and 1909 from £583,500 to £1,990,000, an increase of £1,407,000, equal to £25 a head of the population. Another result is that of the larger towns of Würtemberg only one has a lower taxation than Ulm. It is solely owing to its successful land policy that this enterprising town, without imposing heavy burdens on the general body of ratepayers, has been able to undertake a programme of social reforms which has created for it an honourable reputation throughout Germany.”