Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum

by J. W. Sullivan

Effects of Municipal Land.

A city public domain, open to citizen occupiers under just stipulations, would in several directions have far-reaching results.

Should this domain be occupied by, say, one thousand families of a population of 50,000, an immediate result, affecting the whole city, would be a fall in rents. In fact, the mere existence of the public domain, with a probability that his tenants would remove to it, might cause a landlord to reduce his rents. Besides, the value of all land, in the city and about it, held on speculation, would fall. Save in instances of particular advantage, the price of unimproved residence lots would gravitate toward the cost, all things considered, of residence lots in the public domain. This, for these reasons: The corner in land would be broken. Home builders would pay a private owner no more for a lot than the cost of a similar one in the public area. As houses went up on the public domain, the chances of landholders to sell to builders would be diminished. Sellers of land, besides competing with the public land, would then compete with increased activity with one another. Finally, just taxation of their land, valueless as a speculation, would oblige landowners to sell it or to put it to good use.

Even should the growth of the city be rapid, the value of land in private hands could in general advance but little, if at all. With the actual demands of an increased population, the public domain might from time to time be enlarged; but not, it may reasonably be assumed, at a rate that would give rise to an upward tendency of prices in the face of the above-mentioned factors contributing to a downward tendency.

At this point it may be well to remember that, conditions of land purchase by the city being subject to the Referendum, the buying could hardly be accompanied by corrupt bargaining.

When the effect of the public land in depressing land values, in other words in enabling producers to retain the more of their product, was seen, private as well as public agencies might aid in enlarging the scope of that effect. The philanthropic might transfer land to the municipality, preferring to help restore just social conditions rather than to aid in charities that leave the world with more poor than ever; the city might provide for a gradual conversion, in the course of time, of all the land within its limits to public control, first selecting, with the end in view, tracts of little market value, which, open to occupiers, would assist in keeping down the value of lands held privately.

But the more striking results of city public land would lie in another direction. The spontaneous efforts of each individual to increase and to secure the product of his labor would turn the current of production away from the monopolists and toward the producers. With a lot in the public domain, a wage-worker might soon live in his own cottage. As the settler often did in the West, to acquire a home he might first build two or four rooms as the rear, and, living in it, with later savings put up the front. A house and a vegetable garden, with the increased consequent thrift rarely in such situation lacking, would add a large fraction to his year's earnings. Pasture for a cow in suburban city land would add yet more. Then would this wage-earner, now his own landlord and in part a direct producer from the soil, withdraw his children from the labor market, where they compete for work perhaps with himself, and send them on to school.

What would now happen should the wage-workers of the city demand higher wages? It is hardly to be supposed that any industrial centre could reach the stage of radical reform contemplated at this point much in advance of others. When the labor organizations throughout the country take hold of direct legislation, and taste of its successes, they will nowhere halt. They will no more hesitate than does a conquering army. Learning what has been done in Switzerland, they will go the lengths of the Swiss radicals and, with more elbow room, further. Hence, when in one industrial centre the governing workers should seek better terms, similar demands from fellow laborers, as able to enforce them, would be heard elsewhere.

The employer of our typical city, even now often unable to find outside the unions the unemployed labor he must have, would then, should he attempt it, to a certainty fail. The thrifty wage-working householder, today a tenant fearful of loss of work, could then strike and stay out. The situation would resemble that in the West twenty years ago, when open land made the laborer his own master and wages double what they are now. Wages, then, would perforce be moved upward, and hours be shortened, and a long step be made toward that state of things in which two employers offer work to one employé. And, legal and social forces no longer irresistibly opposed to the wage-workers, thenceforth wages would advance. At every stage they would tend to the maximum possible under the improved conditions. In the end, under fully equal conditions, everywhere, for all classes, the producer would gather to himself the full product of his labor.

The average business man, too, of the city of our illustration, himself a producer—that is, a help to the consumer—would under the better conditions reap new opportunities. Far less than now would he fear failure through bad debts and hard times; through the wage-workers' larger earnings, he would obtain a larger volume of trade; he would otherwise naturally share in the generally increased production; and he would participate in the common benefits from the better local government.