Dec 17, JDN 2458105

I probably wouldn’t even have known about this issue if I hadn’t ended up living in Irvine.

The wealthiest real estate magnate in the United States is Donald Bren, sole owner of the Irvine Company. His net wealth is estimated at $15 billion, which puts him behind the likes of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, but well above Donald Trump even at his most optimistic estimates.

Where did he get all this wealth?

The Irvine Company isn’t even particularly shy about its history, though of course they put a positive spin on it. Right there on their own website they talk about how it used to be a series of ranches farmed by immigrants. Look a bit deeper into their complaints about “squatters” and it becomes apparent that the main reason they were able to get so rich is that the immigrant tenant farmers whose land they owned were disallowed by law from owning real estate. (Not to mention how it was originally taken from Native American tribes, as most of the land in the US was.) Then of course the land has increased in price and been passed down from generation to generation.

This isn’t capitalism. Capitalism requires a competitive market with low barriers of entry and trade in real physical capital—machines, vehicles, factories. The ownership of land by a single family that passes down its title through generations while extracting wealth from tenant farmers who aren’t allowed to own anything has another name. We call it feudalism.

The Irvine Company is privately-held, and thus not required to publish its finances the way a publicly-traded company would be, so I can’t tell you exactly what assets its owns or how much profit it makes. But I can tell you that it owns over 57,000 housing units—and there are only 96,000 housing units in the city of Irvine, so that means they literally own 60% of the city. They don’t just own houses either; they also own most of the commercial districts, parks, and streets.

As a proportion of all the housing in the United States, that isn’t so much. Even compared to Southern California (the most densely populated region in North America), it may not seem all that extravagant. But within the city of Irvine itself, this is getting dangerously close to a monopoly. Housing is expensive all over California, so they can’t be entirely blamed—but is it really that hard to believe that letting one company own 60% of your city is going to increase rents?

This is sort of thing that calls for a bold and unequivocal policy response. The Irvine Company should be forced to subdivide itself into multiple companies—perhaps Irvine Residential, Irvine Commercial, and Irvine Civic—and then those companies should be made publicly-traded, and a majority of their shares immediately distributed to the residents of the city. Unlike most land reform proposals, selecting who gets shares is actually quite straightforward: Anyone who pays rent on an Irvine Company property receives a share.

Land reform has a checkered history to say the least, which is probably why policymakers are reluctant to take this sort of approach. But this is a land reform that could be handled swiftly, by a very simple mechanism, with very clear rules. Moreover, it is entirely within the rule of law, as the Irvine Company is obviously at this point an illegitimate monopoly in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, Clayton Antitrust Act, and Federal Trade Commission Act. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index for real estate in the city of Irvine would be at least 3600, well over the standard threshold of 2500 that FTC guidelines consider prima facie evidence of an antitrust violation in the market. Formally, the land reform could be accomplished by collecting damages in an amount necessary to purchase the shares at the (mandatory) IPO, then the beneficiaries of the damages paid in shares would be the residents of Irvine. The FTC is also empowered to bring criminal charges if necessary.

Oddly, most of the talk about the Irvine Company among residents of Irvine centers around their detailed policy decisions, whether expanding road X was a good idea, how you feel about the fact that they built complex Y. (There’s also a bizarre reverence for the Irvine Master Plan; people speak of it as if it were the US Constitution, when it’s actually more like Amazon.com’s five-year revenue targets. This is a for-profit company. Their plan is about taking your money.) This is rather like debating whether or not you have a good king; even if you do, you’re still a feudal subject. No single individual or corporation should have that kind of power over the population of an entire city. This is not a small city, either; Irvine has about three-quarters of the population of Iceland, or a third the population of Boston. Take half of Donald Bren’s $15 billion, divide it evenly over the 250,000 people of the city, and each one gets $30,000. That’s a conservative estimate of how much monopolistic rent the Irvine Company has extracted from the people of Irvine.

By itself, redistributing the assets of the Irvine Company wouldn’t solve the problem of high rents in Southern California. But I think it would help, and I’m honestly having trouble seeing the downsides. The only people who seem to be harmed are billionaires who inherited wealth that was originally extracted from serfs. Like I said, this is within the law, and wouldn’t require new legislation. We would only need to aggressively enforce laws that have been on the books for a century. It doesn’t even seem like it should be politically unpopular, as you’re basically giving a check for tens of thousands of dollars to each voting resident in the city.

Of course, it won’t happen. As usual, I’m imagining more justice in the world than there actually has ever been.