PROPERTY RIGHTS AND ‘HERITAGE AREAS’

In fact, it seems like such a good idea that more and more communities are jumping on board. From a string of abandoned steel mills on a riverfront in Scranton, Pa., to a stretch of the Hudson between New York City and Albany, the number of areas receiving the “National Heritage Area” designation has boomed since Congress created the program in 1984.

Twenty-seven such areas were designated through 2005. But last year alone, an additional 10 regions received the distinction. And six more were approved by the House last month and await Senate action.

The problem, of course, is that this is not old-fashioned American entrepreneurship, at all. Old-fashioned American entrepreneurs might look for economic opportunity by raising private capital to restore and find new uses for abandoned buildings in depressed areas, sure. But asking the federal government for a handout — and for authority to limit what your neighbors can do with their own properties, lest their plans somehow conflict with yours? That scheme has a very different parentage.

Englishmen and Europeans would recognize this model. There, permission from some “borough council” is typically required just to install a new window, replace a thatched roof or slap on a different color paint. It’s supposed to keep everything looking quaint and folksy, but it’s a bureaucratic tangle that often makes an owner wonder who really owns “his” property. Meantime, needless to say, complaints are endemic that while “the little guy” suffers such soul-degrading petty tyranny, those with the right political contacts can get all these rules waived in a trice with a few strategic donations to the right campaign chests.

Private owners can protect resources for hundreds of years. The government doesn’t do so well. Most of the petrified wood in the Petrified Forest is gone.

In his fine book “The Myth of the Robber Barons,” Burton Folsom draws a vital distinction between true 19th century market entrepreneurs who earned their fortunes by attracting the business of consumers free to decide where to spend their own money, as opposed to “political entrepreneurs” who instead persuaded politicians to seize those customers’ wealth and transfer it to a favored operator.

True market entrepreneurs such as Cornelius Vanderbilt and J.J. Hill succeeded without government coercion, in direct competition with less-efficient operators whose only hope was to persuade their congressmen to bankrupt these private competitors by imposing “anti-trust” laws and rate regulation designed to penalize the consumer favorites while subsidizing their own, less-efficient operations.

The management of these “National Heritage Areas” is usually turned over to private, nonprofit community groups that have “roles in managing land use in the areas,” reports The Washington Post.

National Heritage Areas thus “pose a threat to private property rights through the exercise of restrictive zoning that may severely limit the extent to which property owners can develop or use their property,” write Cheryl Chumley and Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation in a recent report on these heritage areas. Ms. Chumley and Mr. Utt say such “regulatory takings” through zoning are the “most common form of property rights abuse today.”

Republicans in Congress and property rights activists point out innocent parties with properties in these “heritage areas” now have to answer to a quasi-governmental body about how they develop their own property. And Democrats want to see even more “heritage areas.”

One of the more controversial proposed heritage areas, the “Journey Through Hallowed Ground” scheme, is sponsored by Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va. It runs from Charlottesville to Gettysburg along Route 15, past many American Revolution and Civil War sites.

“We should never seek to honor the heroes of our nation’s founding by trampling the sacred principles for which they fought and died,” objected Peyton Knight of the National Center for Public Policy Research, “namely property rights and limited, local government.”