BY JAMES P. PROUT
BOOK REVIEW
The Land Trap: A New History of the World’ s Oldest Asset By Mike Bird Portfolio / Penguin, 2025 326 pages, with notes and index
It’ s widely known that there is not enough affordable housing in many places in the United States, and around the world. Rents are high, and the“ dream” of home ownership is becoming just that for many. Wages and savings have not kept pace with the continued rise in real estate prices. If you want to sell, great, but you still need somewhere to live— and it is expensive.
A situation like this ought to right itself pretty quickly. After all, capital flows toward the highest return. But because of regulation, local opposition, high construction costs, land scarcity, etc., relief appears to be happening at a glacial pace. Escalating real estate prices have been great for some, but for many, dramatic increases in land prices has slowed the expansion of cheaper housing and stymied opportunities to own.
How do we find a solution to this challenge without destroying the massive wealth already built into legacy real estate holdings? In The Land Trap: A New History of the World’ s Oldest Asset, reporter and podcast host Mike Bird tries to make sense of this“ land trap” challenge. Bird takes the reader on a tour— both historical and geographic— of how investors, governments and markets have viewed real estate over time. This includes a primer on the economic thinkers and planners who’ ve grappled with the issues of land ownership. There is much history here, but a large part of the book focuses on recent experiences. Although light on conclusions, The Land Trap is well written, colorful and timely.
Bird first reminds the reader of real estate’ s allure as an investment. Land ownership has for centuries conveyed success and status. However, there are attributes of real estate that make it trickier than other assets. Except on a small scale( for example, Singapore), you can’ t make more land; what’ s here is here. And unlike goods or commodities, land can’ t be moved to where it might bring more value. Finally, the value of the asset depends on the attractiveness of its surroundings. The puzzle of how to harness land’ s intrinsic value so it can be used to spur investment and growth— to monetize a“ stranded asset”— is a recurrent theme in the book.
In the 19th century, land was as hot a public issue as it is today. Land ownership was the preserve of the rich, and the growing worker classes were excluded. At the same time, governments sought some way to tap into growing land values to increase revenue. Enter Henry George, a crusading US newspaper reporter-turned-reformer, who advocated for a single tax on land to raise revenue and expand ownership. Although less well known today, George’ s ideas excited many in and outside the United States, including voters in New York City where George was a losing candidate for mayor in 1886.
Using George’ s ideas as a pivot, the book outlines approaches to land assets and land reform around the world from the beginning of the 20th century through today. George’ s followers met with Lenin( and Stalin) at a 1907 conference in London, but the Bolsheviks had little time for his gradualist perspective. Killing kulaks and collectivizing land was more to their taste. Sun-Yat Sen tried to channel George, but he died too early to see his land reform ideas in China gain traction.
The upheaval of World War II re-energized efforts to reform land ownership and uses. Wolf Ladejinsky, a Ukrainian-born US agrarian economist, was given a wide-ranging brief to reorganize post-war Japanese land ownership with the aim of enhancing democracy and capitalism. Ladejinsky bopped around Asia— Japan, Korea, Vietnam and India— for two decades, trying to broaden real estate ownership and decrease the power of entrenched landlords. His efforts worked in some places and failed in others. Most of the failures stemmed from governments caught between pleasing peasant farmers and richer landlords.
As China liberalized its economy, Bird writes, real estate took center stage. Individuals, eager to invest in anything, poured money into construction schemes. Local governments, looking for revenue, spurred intermediaries to build … and build … and build. Evergrande, a now bankrupt Chinese real estate development company, is used as a poster child for the frenzy. The bubble( maybe the biggest ever) is still there, says Bird, with neither investors nor governments willing to book the losses necessary for it to pop.
The book covers a lot of territory, but there are some relevant issues that are given less attention. The saga of how mortgagebacked securities seduced the smartest people around and led to the 2008 US banking crisis gets only a cursory mention. There was a pervasive belief that people always paid their mortgages. Until they didn’ t. And little is said of the demographic impact of people living longer and staying in their homes, rather than selling to new buyers.
The central thesis of the book is that we are in a“ land trap” where high prices lock out many, but governments and markets can’ t afford to see dramatic contraction in value. Bird admits it is going to be tough to get out of the trap and offers modest proposals to alleviate the worst of it: expand the housing supply, re-visit Henry George’ s ideas on land taxes, stop subsidizing real estate investment over development, etc. But land still casts a spell over us. As Mark Twain is quoted as saying,“ Buy land, they ain’ t making it anymore!”
James P. Prout is a lawyer with more than 30 years of capital market experience and is now a consultant to some of the world’ s largest public companies. He can be reached at jpprout @ gmail. com.
www. MoAF. org | Winter 2026 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 39