Property rights have always been political. From the earliest liberal movements, they were a revolutionary force—a means of breaking the grip of feudal hierarchies that had dominated for centuries. In a world where land ownership had long been the exclusive domain of monarchs and aristocrats, liberal reformers fought to place property into the hands of ordinary people. To own land was to escape servitude, to gain independence, and to participate fully in civic life.
The liberal state was built not just on the ballot box, but on the belief that people should be free to use and improve what they own—and that this freedom would dismantle the inherited privilege of the few to create an economic system that values individuals and merit.
That foundational promise is collapsing. Across the Anglosphere, property rights are increasingly obstructed by bureaucracies that exist to protect incumbents. In cities like Toronto, Vancouver, London, San Francisco, and Sydney, it is effectively illegal to use residential land for anything other than what’s already there. Adding a modest apartment or multiplex can require years of applications, approvals, public consultations, and appeals. Even where reforms have been passed to allow “missing middle” housing, the conditions are often so restrictive that these homes remain economically unviable. The result is policy that appears progressive, while little has meaningfully changed.
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Scarcity has created a new aristocracy—one where access to housing, and to the prosperity and stability that come with it, depends less on personal effort and more on family wealth. In major cities across the Anglosphere, first-time homebuyers increasingly rely on parental assistance. Without it, the path to ownership—and with it, access to good schools, decent commutes, and a foothold in the middle class—is becoming closed. Cities that once promised upward mobility now sort people in and out by birthright. The defenders of this status quo rarely say they’re against housing. Instead, they object to traffic, to shadows that fall on their backyards, to the sound of construction. They worry about trees and bird habitats, but only when homes are proposed nearby. They invoke “heritage” to protect strip malls and parking lots. Urban infill is opposed on aesthetic grounds, while suburban expansion is blocked in the name of ecosystem preservation—even as prices soar and families are pushed into longer, emissions-heavy leapfrog commutes. The same voices that demand livability in theory will, in practice, oppose housing on almost any parcel of land. What they really fear isn’t environmental degradation or traffic congestion. It’s proximity. Their environmentalism ends the moment a neighbour wants to build something. Housing, to them, is pollution—unless it already exists and belongs to them. Property rights are the next liberal battleground This is not environmentalism or local democracy. It’s gatekeeping in a recycled shopping bag. And it’s not liberalism. It’s a form of feudalism, maintained by process and masked by everyman rhetoric. If freedom no longer includes the right to live where opportunity exists—or to build something new—then it no longer means much at all. We need to make property rights a central liberal cause—not as a libertarian talking point, but as a practical and moral necessity. In too many parts of the English-speaking world, you can own land but can’t build on it. Most major cities still reserve the majority of residential land for low-density use. While some jurisdictions, including Ontario and California, have nominally ended single-family zoning, these reforms are often undermined by height limits, unit caps, taxes, parking requirements, and bureaucratic delays that make new homes financially unviable. Legalizing housing only works if people can actually afford to build it. Even when progress is made, property rights remain conditional. In 1992, the Charlottetown Accord, among other things, including recognizing Quebec as a distinct society, proposed adding to the Charter “the right to the peaceful enjoyment and free disposition of property,” subject to reasonable limits. It was a modest, liberal proposal—not a ban on zoning or regulation, but a recognition that the right to use and improve land is foundational to a free society. The Accord failed, and with it, the idea that property rights deserved constitutional protection. Perhaps it’s time to amend that failure and revive the notion that Canadians deserve Charter-protected rights to improve what they own. It’s time to tax land At the same time, we need to reconsider how our tax system treats land—and what it rewards versus what it punishes. In Canada, earned income is taxed quickly and heavily, while land—one of the largest and least productive sources of wealth—is barely touched. A young worker earning $150,000 pays far more of their wealth in taxes than a senior with $3 million in real estate and the same income. That isn’t just inefficient. It’s unjust. A land value tax offers a better path. It taxes the unimproved value of land—the location premium created by public investment, population growth, and economic activity—without penalizing building or productive use. Unlike other forms of wealth, land can’t be hidden, moved, or minimized. It can only be made more useful. That makes it the ideal tax base: transparent, immobile, and responsible for nearly three-quarters of all wealth in this country. Taxing land would lower speculative values, encourage development, and redirect investment into more productive areas of the economy. It would also create fiscal space to reduce income taxes, putting more money in the hands of workers and families. That means greater freedom to invest in housing, start businesses, or fuel innovation. Passive income isn’t the problem. But we want money flowing into investments that build the future—not into artificially scarce land and predatory landlordism. Just as important, it would give all landowners a stake in real economic growth. If land value depends not on constraints and hoarding, but on the underlying strength of local incomes and opportunity, then owners would be newly aligned with community prosperity. The incentive becomes to build, to welcome, and to grow, not to wall off and wait. A land value tax would rebalance the system. It would reward improvement, not hoarding. It would turn ownership into a responsibility—not just an entitlement. And when paired with housing reform, it would help restore the liberal ideal that prosperity can be earned, not just inherited. Fail to act, and freedom won’t come back Younger generations in Canada and across the Anglosphere see housing as a rigged game. Too often, they’re right. Political leaders talk about affordability while defending the very rules that make housing unaffordable. They embrace public subsidies but block private supply. They describe themselves as ”forward-thinking” while doing everything possible to preserve the built form of 1972. They mistake inertia for prudence and stagnation for order. But liberalism should be about movement—upward, outward, and forward. The best thing we can do for democracy isn’t just to protect speech or elections. It’s to ensure people have something real to fight for: a home, a future, an ownership stake in the society they’re expected to sustain. That begins with land. That begins with property. And that’s where the next great fight for freedom will be won or lost.
Eric Lombardi stands at the forefront of urban development and advocacy as the founder and president of More Neighbours Toronto, a volunteer organization committed to ending the housing crisis. Professionally, he specializes in strategy management consulting in the finance and technology sectors.
