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Tyrannis Inc.

September 20, 2005 1:38 am

Property rights--alas--get 'real'

THE STATE OF VIRGINIA hates dictators-- Sic Semper Tyrannis and all that--presumably because it doesn't like the competition. Richmond tightly controls localities' prerogatives, and prevents many local actions that could control the kind of growth that--just the latest example--is crowding classrooms in King George County.

The other great anti-growth-control force in Virginia is the Old Dominion ethos, given interpretative teeth by the state Supreme Court, that supposedly makes ours a strong "property rights" state. Actually, however, given our state's and our region's heritage, rightly understood, much the opposite is true.

Let's define terms. When someone invokes the phrase "property rights" in its current context, it's important to understand what he means. He does not mean, exactly, the "property" safeguarded in the Constitution's Fifth Amendment. Such property might include anything privately owned. But contemporary "property rights" seldom refer to automobiles or family heirlooms or the exercise equipment in your den. These days and in this place, the phrase normally concerns land.

Land is, axiomatically, sacred to Southerners. The attachments of our people to the soil traditionally have been profound, whether rooted in a sprawling delta plantation or a subsistence dirt farm on a Tennessee hill. The land is what the cream of Southern manhood warred valiantly to protect--this is the hoary Southern perspective, at any rate--from invasion by the federal government. As Scarlett O'Hara's father, Gerald, explained, "Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin' for, worth fightin' for, worth dyin' for, because it's the only thing that lasts."

But it isn't lasting much in these parts and many other parts of the South, where development is a Second Reconstruction, upending settled life and creating The New and Different! Ironically, the governing institutions of our state--its lawmakers, its courts--aid and defend this onslaught of speculation and despoilment, this essentially Yankee world view, often because they fail to distinguish land, "the only thing that lasts," from mere real estate conveyed for commercial gain. Not for nothing did former North Carolina governor Terry Sanford urge the people of this region to "avoid Northern mistakes in a Southern setting."

Another former governor, Mississippi's William Winter, interviewed by the Center for a Better South, paints the challenge: "Already in our fastest-growing areas we are seeing the problems which reckless development can cause. Clogged highways, foul and unhealthy air, overtaxed [i.e., overburdened] utility systems, and the consumption of some of our prime open spaces and productive farm land by urban sprawl threaten the quality of life for many people. We must work to preserve the livability of our region."

No one suggests that the South shouldn't change or that Southerners should believe that "damnprogress," like "damnYankee" before it, is a single indivisible word. But the blind impressment of property rights into the service of merely "real" interests threatens that which makes the South different and, in respects, better; that which Mr. Winter describes as "our emphasis on civility and graciousness and common courtesy." These virtues, communal as well as individual, surely are inseparable from land that deserves protection now just as much as in 1861.