IN JANUARY, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s chief diversity officer sent an email announcing the “Diversity Word of the Month”—privilege.

“Privilege is a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group,” the email read. It continued:

People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent.

The email included a list of privileged groups, including “middle- or owning-class people.”

“So now it’s bad to save up and buy a home?” journalist Paul D. Thacker asked on X, the platform formerly called Twitter.

What was once a near-universal aspiration—to own property—is now seen as an unearned privilege. To some, the great dividing line in America is between those who own property and those who don’t. On social media, land-owning farmers are compared to “land barons.” Rental property owners are called “parasitical scum.” When Rhode Island passed a bill extending public beach areas onto private land, Redditors celebrated. “Yet again, a big loss for rich folk is a huge win for everyone,” one commented.

George Sheetz at the Supreme Court

GEORGE SHEETZ IS A PROPERTY OWNER. He’s one of many homeowners and landowners Pacific Legal Foundation currently represents in lawsuits across the country defending property rights. It’s a group of people as diverse as America itself: rich and poor, young and old, black and white, conservative and liberal.

George, whose case was argued at the Supreme Court on January 9, is a quintessential working man. He spent 50 years in construction, first as a $5-an-hour laborer and then as an engineer. “The average, everyday working person is busting their a– to try to survive and try to figure out a way to retire comfortably,” George told Fox News.

What was once a near-universal aspiration—to own property—is now seen as an unearned privilege.

His retirement plan was to build a modest, manufactured home on his plot of land in El Dorado County, California, home of the 1849 Gold Rush. But the County said George could have a building permit only if he paid a $23,420 traffic impact fee—a fee that was designed to shift the costs of commercial development and other uses onto new homes.

“I said, ‘This is ridiculous,’” George told Fox.

When he complained about the exorbitant fee at the county office, County officials told him, “You don’t have to build. No one’s making you build.”

The government was treating George’s modest ambition—to build a home on his own property where he, his wife, and grandson would live—like a luxury that vaulted him into a different status, deserving of extra burdens.

Source: PLF

George sued and spent seven years battling the County through the court system. George’s attorney is Paul Beard, a former PLF attorney now in private practice in California. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear George’s case, Paul asked PLF to join as co-counsel.

At Supreme Court oral arguments, the County’s attorney said it charged the fee to all developers according to a “premeditated schedule.” Even though George’s building plans were small in scope, the County resisted the idea of doing an individualized assessment before issuing fees.

A homebuilder is just a checkbook, to the government.

For those accustomed to seeing the world in black and white dichotomies, property owners represent the entrenched elite.

Property Owners

THE PROPERTY OWNERS PLF has represented recently include a young real estate professional in Washington State, a motorcycle-riding blacksmith in the Montana mountains, a doctor building a family retreat in Tennessee, a yoga-teaching rental property owner in California, a family of third-generation farmers in South Dakota, and a Nebraska widower trying to hold on to his only asset.

There is no shared privilege among them—no marker in all their stories that gives them a uniform level of power. What they have in common, actually, is a simple desire to assert control over their own lives—not over other people’s lives or other people’s land. Only their own.

But for those accustomed to seeing the world in black and white dichotomies, property owners represent the entrenched elite—and their property interest is seen as directly opposed to the public good. Last year, The Nation published “The Case Against Homeownership,” which argued for alternatives to private property like “social housing.”

“Through these efforts and others like them, we can help establish security for all—rather than private property for some—in a new American social pact,” author Jane Chung wrote.

The housing crisis has hardened attitudes toward property owners. The lack of housing supply in overregulated metro areas contributes to the idea that property ownership is a privilege of the upper class, which, in turn, makes it easier for the government to be cavalier about placing heavy burdens on property owners.

There’s cosmic irony there: The more burdens the government puts on property owners, the more it constrains and discourages new building, worsening the housing crisis.

Kelly Lyles in Seattle

KELLY LYLES is another property owner—and she’s about as different from George Sheetz as one could imagine.

An artist in Seattle, Kelly lives in a condo while renting out the small home she owns to two tenants. Kelly’s art is bold, colorful, and distinctly original. She relies on the monthly rent she receives from tenants to make ends meet.

Because she is a single woman in a city, and because she’s a survivor of a violent crime, Kelly is highly selective about her tenants. She needs tenants she can trust, not only to pay rent but also to be peaceable around her and to each other.

But Seattle’s Fair Chance Housing Ordinance prevents property owners from considering prospective tenants’ criminal histories when deciding who can occupy their property.

Originally, the ordinance forbade landlords from even asking about criminal histories. But Kelly and other property owners, represented by PLF, sued the City of Seattle. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled partially in the property owners’ favor: Preventing housing providers from asking about potential tenants’ criminal histories violated the First Amendment, the court said. But PLF also argued Kelly and the other owners had a right to exclude dangerous tenants from their property—and on that, the Ninth Circuit disagreed. Effectively, Seattle housing providers can now ask prospective tenants about their criminal histories, but they can’t do anything with that information, even when a background check reveals a rap sheet as long as your arm.

The City exempts itself from its own ordinance: Public housing is allowed to exclude tenants based on criminal records. It’s only private property owners who are expected to bear the risks of indiscriminately housing former criminals who may pose a threat to the property owners’ own families, other tenants, and their property.

Source: Getty

As in George Sheetz’s case, owning property seems to put people into a separate class the government feels free to encroach on.

PLF asked the Supreme Court to consider Kelly’s case. In our petition we argued the right to exclude potential dangers is fundamental to property ownership and protected by the Due Process Clause.

“The Ninth Circuit’s conclusion that government may deprive an owner of his or her right to exclude for any conceivably legitimate public purpose is contrary to the Framers’ understanding of, and reverence for, the most essential element of property rights,” PLF wrote. Seattle’s ordinance “improperly shifts the burden of solving quintessential public problems onto individual property owners.”

In January, unfortunately, the Supreme Court denied our petition. But the fight to protect Kelly and other owners will continue when the case returns to the district court. PLF will argue that the unconstitutional ban on asking tenants about their criminal histories was so central to the ordinance that the entire thing should now be stricken.

The Fundamental Right to Property

PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON was a 19th-century French socialist who argued that all property ownership was theft. In his 1840 book What Is Property?, he called landowners “thieves” for requiring rent from their tenants. Property ownership “originates in violence” and “violates equality by the rights of exclusion,” Proudhon wrote. “[P]roperty and robbery are synonymous terms… All men in their hearts, I say, bear witness to these truths; they need only to be made to understand it.”

That idea—that owning property is somehow an infringement of other people’s freedom—still exists, even in the United States.

But here, at least, property owners have history on their side: America’s Founders considered the right to property so fundamental that the British practice of “quartering”—housing troops in private homes—was among the Founders’ chief complaints in the Declaration of Independence. With quartering, too, the government expected property owners to bear certain public burdens, and American property owners said no. The Founders also baked property rights into the Constitution, particularly in the Fifth Amendment. (“No person shall… be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”)

The more today’s property owners fight back against unjust encroachment and restrictions of their property, the easier it will become for more people to build, own, and make productive use of property in America. That’s better for each individual property owner who may, through those efforts, more readily reap the rewards of hard work—and it also undermines the cynical argument that positions property owners as a separate class oppressing everyone else. ♦