Lee Fennell's The Unbounded Home

Yale University Press has just released Lee Fennell's book The Unbounded Home.  Here's the publisher's description:

The Unbounded Home grapples with a core metropolitan reality -- that the value and meaning of a home extend beyond its property lines to schools, shops, parks, services, transportation, neighbors, neighborhood aesthetics, and even market conditions. Lee Anne Fennell unpacks the resulting tension between the homeowner’s desire for personal autonomy at home and the impulse to control what happens in surrounding areas to safeguard the home’s value.

 

The stakes are high; this conundrum carries implications for nearly every facet of residential life, including the many neighborhoods in the United States that are segregated by race and social class. Fennell shows how a new understanding of homeownership and  innovations that increase the flexibility of property law can address critical issues of neighborhood control and community composition that have been simmering unresolved for decades.

I've read the book, and it is fantastic.  It is a must-read for anyone interested in (among other things) land use and local government issues.

 

Ben Barros

 

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