The Unbounded Home: Property Values Beyond Property Lines

by Lee Anne Fennell

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.

This edition is a re-publication of the original 2009 book, provided at cost following a rights reversion to the author on July 13, 2023. A PDF version is available for free download from the author's website or from SSRN.

310 pages, 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