Special use values

Special use values
People use place in ways contrary to the neoclassical assumptions of how commodities are
purchased and consumed. We do not dispose of
place after it has been bought and used. Places have
a certain preciousness for their users that is not part
of the conventional concept of a commodity. A
crucial initial difference is that place is indispensable; all human activity must occur somewhere.
Individuals cannot do without place by substituting another product. They can, of course, do with
less place and less desirable place, but they
cannot do without place altogether.
Even when compared to other indispensable
commodities – food, for example – place is still
“THE CITY AS A GROWTH MACHINE” 111
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9780415665308_4_011.qxd 7/30/12 11:03 AM Page 111For those who pay rent to landlords, use values
are the only values at issue. Owners and tenants
can thus sometimes have divergent interests.
When rising property values portend neighborhood transformation, tenants and owners may
adopt different community roles; but ordinarily,
the exchange interests of owners are not
sufficiently significant to divide them from other
residents.
[…]
Special exchange values
Exchange values from place appear as “rent.” We
use the term broadly to include outright purchase
expenditures as well as payments that homebuyers or tenants make to landlords, realtors, mortgage
lenders, real estate lawyers, title companies, and so
forth. As with use values, people pursue exchange
values in ways that differ from the manner in
which they create other commodities. Suppliers
cannot “produce” places in the usual sense of the
term. All places consist, at least in part, of land,
which “is only another name for nature, which is
not produced by man” (Karl Polanyi, The Great
Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1944, p. 72)
and obviously not produced for sale in a market.
The quantity is fixed. It is not, says David Harvey
(The Limits to Capital. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1982, p. 357), “the product of labor.” This
makes the commodity description of land, in
Marx’s word, “fictitious.” Michael Storper and
Richard Walker (“The Theory of Labor and the
Theory of Location,” International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 7, 1 (1983): 43) describe
land, like labor, as a “pseudocommodity.”
Place as monopoly
Perhaps the fundamental “curiosity” is that land
markets are inherently monopolistic, providing
owners, as a class, with complete control over the
total commodity supply. There can be no additional
entrepreneurs or any new product. The individual
owner also has a monopoly over a subsection of
the marketplace. Every parcel of land is unique
in the idiosyncratic access it provides to other
parcels and uses, and this quality underscores the
it as well. The standing of a neighborhood vis-àvis other neighborhoods creates conditions that its
residents experience in common. Each place has a
particular political or economic standing vis-à-vis
other places that affect the quality of life and
opportunities available to those who live within its
boundaries.