Joshua Specht's 'Property Values' Examines How Land Ownership Shaped America's Grid and Suburbs

Joshua Specht's new book "Property Values" (Princeton) traces American land ownership from the country's founding to the present, arguing that Native dispossession is as fundamental as slavery to the nation's original sin. The book examines how settlers and later suburbanites saw themselves as pioneers remaking the land. In 1810, surveyors founded Circleville, Ohio, around a circular Native earthwork, later destroying it to impose a rectangular grid. Thomas Jefferson proposed a continental grid of square plots, and on September 30, 1785, surveyors began laying it out in Ohio. The public-land survey eventually covered two-thirds of the contiguous United States. Land grants funded 52 land-grant universities using over ten million acres taken from nearly 250 Native polities. The 1862 Homestead Act distributed free squares the size of Pakistan. By 1960, more Americans lived in suburban single-family homes than in cities or countryside. Levittown, Long Island, built 17,447 houses in four years. Critics like Lewis Mumford, John Wesley Powell, and Albert Pope condemned the grid and suburbs for environmental and social harm. Specht calls for a truce between city and suburb.