GUILFORD-I want to commend Steev Lynn for correcting the historical record in response to Tristan Roberts' commentary. Where Roberts tried to explain today's homelessness crisis through the lens of English enclosures, Lynn rightly pointed out that the story was far more complicated.
What Roberts overlooks is that the defining feature of English and later British landholding was not some lost utopia of shared commons, but hereditary control that persists to this day. Serfs were bound to feudal lords for centuries.
When serfdom ended, aristocratic families retained their estates through entails and primogeniture, ensuring that land stayed in a narrow band of hereditary hands.
That system still shapes the United Kingdom: less than 1% of the population owns about half of the land, much of it in aristocratic families who trace ownership back hundreds of years. (See Who Owns England?, the 2019 book by Guy Shrubsole, based on his and Anna Powell-Smith's blog of the same name.) The Crown Estate, the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, and the Church of England remain among the largest landholders.
Enclosure was one chapter in that larger story, and, yes, it was disruptive and harsh. But Roberts casts it as the central villain behind everything from wage labor to Brattleboro's housing crisis. That framing is misleading. The deeper continuity is how hereditary privilege consolidated control of land - in Britain then, and in different forms of wealth concentration now.
Here in the U.S., the crisis on our streets is not a hangover from 16th-century English land law. It stems from decades of underinvestment in affordable housing, stagnant wages, rising health care and education costs, untreated addiction, and the dismantling of mental health services. These are present-day failures that demand present-day solutions.
If we are serious about addressing homelessness, we need clarity, not historical myth. Romanticizing "the commons" as a model ignores that real commons were always limited, contested, and prone to exploitation.
The harder work is to recognize how concentrated wealth and weak public policy create the desperation we see now - and to hold today's decision-makers accountable for fixing it.
Chip Carter
Guilford
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