The Unbounded Home: Property Values Beyond Property Lines by Lee Anne Fennell

by Lee Anne Fennell

The Unbounded Home grapples with a core metropolitan reality -- that the value and meaning of a home extend beyond its property lines to schools, shops, parks, services, transportation, neighbors, neighborhood aesthetics, and even market conditions. Lee Anne Fennell unpacks the resulting tension between the homeowner’s desire for personal autonomy at home and the impulse to control what happens in surrounding areas to safeguard the home’s value.

 

The stakes are high; this conundrum carries implications for nearly every facet of residential life, including the many neighborhoods in the United States that are segregated by race and social class. Fennell shows how a new understanding of homeownership and  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.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Lee Fennell is Max Pam Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why do homebuyers seek to regulate their neighborhoods and everything near their neighborhoods? Prof. Fennell points out that a home's value is not just based on the physical house itself, but on everything surrounding the house, including the neighborhood, schools, and other nearby land uses. So a homebuyer who seeks to preserve the home's value will naturally want to control these factors. Fennell points out that this desire for control sometimes leads to negative results (e.g. zoning designed to exclude poorer people, homeowners' association rules that are overly restrictive) and suggests a variety of innovative means of reconciling homeowner interests with the broader public good.

[UChicagoLaw]

A brilliant synthesis of much of her work rethinking core concepts of property law. - Tom Ginsburg