Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/15

cause of constant suffering and error. Freeholders, for instance, never seem to understand their actual position, but unlearnedly imagine that as they hold their land in fee they have control of that which other people, builders, place upon it; that when they let their freehold land for building they obtain a freehold price by way of rental, and that the reversion, after ninety years or so, is worth consideration and of present value. These all are fallacies: the freeholder's control is very superficial, and his ground rents, even on the large estates in Westminster and Bloomsbury, are an economic error, a financial waste. A simple process of arithmetic will show that if a man of statutable age grants building leases for the usual term, the reversion of the buildings cannot be, within an ordinary lifetime, of appreciable worth. It is moreover evident that a clear title, with no covenants and no superior control, must be more valuable than a lease containing cumbrous stipulations, with the possibility of legal complications, unanticipated loss or even forfeiture. The depreciated worth of leasehold property compared with freehold is the measure of this difference; and yet the freeholder will hardly bring himself to admit and understand that what he calls a freehold ground rent is but leasehold in its value; that the freehold which he let became by action of the lease depreciated to mere leasehold in the rent that it commands; and that for this lessened worth of his commodity he has the fiction of an ultimate reversion, which, even to his heirs, when two-thirds of the term has lapsed, will hardly be of any value. He has deprived himself for sixty years at least of something like a quarter of the value of his property. He had a good commodity to sell, spontaneously he made it bad, and he is then obliged to let it at a corresponding under-price; and all for an ideal gain so far remote that a mere peppercorn insurance could suffice to represent it. His financial loss is thus immediate and absolute; but besides this loss, he has for the remainder of his life the care of supervision, of collecting