I'm reading We Are As Gods, a history of the back-to-the-land movment in the 1970s in the USA, and these hippy collectives - yes, white and middle class, but still they're all 20 - are buying 100 acres of gorgeous wilderness in Vermont like it's nothing.
In contrast, the average amount of land you get if you look at sale listings for homesteads in britain is ~4 acres.
(Looking it up right now, those 4acre smallholdings here are £600,000ish. I can find 100 acres in the USA for $37,000, and ok perhaps that land isn't great quality, but no one ever said back-to-the-landers were known for smart agricultural decisionmaking XD You can't live your off grid fantasy on 4 acres, that's basically two fields.)
In the UK, most large landholders are descended from friends of William the Conqueror - a French king, who successfully invaded England in 1066AD. Turning common land into parcels of land owned by his close buddies was a key strategy for keeping their loyalty, and subduing the locals. If you're a certain kind of English socialist, the enclosure of the commons is a pivotal turning point in describing modern inequality here.
Even if you buy a house, you can't always buy the land it's on at the same time, so you're stuck paying rent, and if your rental contract for the house runs out you have to buy another one.
So yeah, I think it's that tightning grip of capitalism thing, where you're still in that 1066 stage of subduing the indigenous people and smashing older ways of collectively handling land, ensuring it's all Owned by the Right Sort of person; and then it'll move on to stage two where suddenly, it's owned by fewer and fewer people and becomes more and more valuable.
Re: well, crud
I'm reading We Are As Gods, a history of the back-to-the-land movment in the 1970s in the USA, and these hippy collectives - yes, white and middle class, but still they're all 20 - are buying 100 acres of gorgeous wilderness in Vermont like it's nothing.
In contrast, the average amount of land you get if you look at sale listings for homesteads in britain is ~4 acres.
(Looking it up right now, those 4acre smallholdings here are £600,000ish. I can find 100 acres in the USA for $37,000, and ok perhaps that land isn't great quality, but no one ever said back-to-the-landers were known for smart agricultural decisionmaking XD You can't live your off grid fantasy on 4 acres, that's basically two fields.)
In the UK, most large landholders are descended from friends of William the Conqueror - a French king, who successfully invaded England in 1066AD. Turning common land into parcels of land owned by his close buddies was a key strategy for keeping their loyalty, and subduing the locals. If you're a certain kind of English socialist, the enclosure of the commons is a pivotal turning point in describing modern inequality here.
Even if you buy a house, you can't always buy the land it's on at the same time, so you're stuck paying rent, and if your rental contract for the house runs out you have to buy another one.
So yeah, I think it's that tightning grip of capitalism thing, where you're still in that 1066 stage of subduing the indigenous people and smashing older ways of collectively handling land, ensuring it's all Owned by the Right Sort of person; and then it'll move on to stage two where suddenly, it's owned by fewer and fewer people and becomes more and more valuable.