Shoemaker: Re-Placing Property
In Re-Placing Property, Jessica A. Shoemaker (Nebraska Law, also full disclosure: Project Director) explores the relationship between property law and human placemaking, considering how property choices impact our attachments to place and the kinds of places we make and inhabit together. Shoemaker focuses on understanding the historical impact of property systems and the many ways law and collective legal choices about property rights are continuously reshaping community members’ relationships to each other and to land.
Shoemaker uses a series of case studies — from historic choices about who received property rights and why to the modern land-access challenges of beginning farmers—to highlight the dynamic nature of property law and its deep connection to placemaking.
Shoemaker also emphasizes the many ways that the law arbitrates which place attachments are valued and not in a range of ongoing land-use conflicts. She acknowledges, for example, the historic and ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples and also explores alternative cases, including the durable claims of families using public lands for grazing and the lasting rights of now-absent heirs of legacy family farm operations.
Emphasis is also placed on how places are being reshaped by increasing property ownership by investment firms and extremely wealthy individuals. Shoemaker highlights these trends in both the financialization of farmland and investor takeover of significant portions of single-family housing in suburban and urban environments. Shoemaker frames these investor purchases as a form of property ownership without any place attachment and questions whether it should be regarded in the same way, legally, as other more personal land relations.
Ultimately, Shoemaker employs a five-section analysis to address these themes. Section one provides context for the meaning of land, property, and place. Section two explores early land distribution policies such as the Homestead Act and further considers how property rules continue to reshape property rights. This includes two case studies, one on Indigenous-led pipeline protests across the Great Plains and one on the recent development of new rental-only housing communities. Third, the author proposes a new theory of property and place relations, creating a new taxonomy to assess both benefits and risks of emphasizing place-based attachment values in property law. In section four, Shoemaker applies this theory to a set of additional case studies, with a focus on place-based values can contribute to inequality. Finally, section five ends with a series of personal narratives, with Shoemaker exploring how these considerations require us to ask what place-based attachments warrant legal protection and what action must be taken to create these legal protections.
At the conclusion of the article, Shoemaker suggests that reexaming public “rights of access” may be a small but influential way to start encouraging placemaking in the face of strong, exclusive property rights. This framework attempts to provide transparent consideration of placemaking in the context of case studies while providing illustrations of this placemaking in both urban and rural landscapes.
