By Barry Cunningham
For many years, shoppers entering a fashionable shopping mall in New York City had to detour around a small wooden house in the entranceway.
The little house with brown shingles and a small yard with a fence was the equivalent of a mud-brick home sitting on the street in front of Beiijing's trendy Shin Kong Place – a nightmare hallucination of unspeakable horror to Chinese urban planners.
But in the Elmhurst neighborhood of New York, the little old lady who owned the house, Mary Sendek, was a folk heroine.
Her house symbolized the sacred American belief that if a person owns a house and land, it cannot be taken away from them by anyone; and especially not by real estate developers or the government.
The architects who designed the mall thought they would have no problem buying up the house in order to bulldoze it and make way for the world's first circular shopping emporium.
But the elderly grandmother refused to sell out.
"I've got a dog and he has to have a place to run," said Sendek, explaining why she would not accept million-dollar offers for her tiny plot of land.
The architects had no choice but to build around her, leaving a pie-slice open space with a poor-looking house messing up their dream of the perfect 360-degree luxury shopping paradise.
I'm reminded of that little house every time I read about another real estate land-grab in rural China, with local farmers grieving that their homes and farmlands have been gobbled up by rich developers for a few measly thousand yuan in compensation.
It is encouraging to see land evictions being debated in China because in the US the debate seems to have ended in favor of the rich.
The US is starting to look more like China when it comes to officially sanctioned land-grabs.
Under the medieval principle of "eminent domain," the US Supreme Court has now ruled that local governments may force property owners to sell out and make way for private economic development when officials decide it would benefit the public.
Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was the lone dissenter, writing, "Now, the specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."
As a landowner troubled by the court's decision, I began to wonder about the advantages of the collective system in China, where only the State can own land.
My own little house in New Jersey sits on a quarter-acre of land which I own down to the center of the earth and as high as the skies above.
But my town's property taxes are also sky-high.
If you think of the so-called property tax as a rent you pay to the government, what is the incentive for "owning a home?"
Would I rather have the town own the land and no longer need to pay these outrageous taxes?
Possibly, but not likely, because like most American homeowners the pride of ownership is in my DNA.
Trouble is, the worldwide financial crash was bound up in this supposed miracle of home ownership. I doubt that under China's collective land ownership, those bad bank loans would have been allowed to stack up like a house of cards until the roof came tumbling down, bringing the global economy to its knees.
Moreover, most big-city dwellers in the US live in apartment houses, not in one-family houses.
The "housing bubble" is cocktail party chatter in New York as well as in Beijing.
And there's really not that much difference in co-operative apartments in either city, where you're not really buying a house and land, but a share in a lease.
In both cities, real estate speculators are bidding up the prices so high there could be a second housing collapse.
Despite our different concepts of housing rights, it seems that in both countries, people still feel the basic human urge for their own roof and their own patch of ground.
The author is an editor with the Global Times
