[Vwoolf] Rent or own?

Fri Jul 3 10:01:41 EDT 2020

I hope I never said that there was “little difference between leasing and owning except for legalities”, tho’ I will say that a 999-year lease seems to me very close to owning a freehold.  (I am not alone in holding this opinion.)  And of course I was only talking about England & Wales – not even Scotland – far less the US.  (Perhaps I should have been talking about Scotland – which I’m not equipped to do – since the Ramsays’ house is in Skye!)

The question I was raising was how better off you were if you had a lease on a property as opposed to a rental agreement.  It’s impossible to answer unless you know the individual terms of the leasehold v. the rental agreement.  Why did the Woolfs move from 52 Tavistock Sq to Mecklenburgh Sq?  Why, when they moved, were they still holding onto 52 TS? They were hamstrung by an expiring lease.

(Oh, and I misspelt “peppercorn”.)

After all, I *did* say that the British were obsessed with *owning* property.  Do I have to say also that it’s a way of making money long-term?

Stuart

From: Mary Ellen Foley via Vwoolf 
Sent: Friday, July 3, 2020 2:40 PM
To: Victoria Rosner 
Cc: Woolf Listserv 
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Rent or own?

I would take issue with there being little difference between leasing and owning except for legalities.  

As least in the US, a house is not only a machine for living (thank you, Victoria Rosner) but also a machine for wealth creation.  And the government itself had a huge part in excluding Black people from that method of attaining prosperity, loaning money, for example, to post-war developers of suburbs on condition that they not sell to Black people and that they put into the deeds that the owners of houses in these new tracts could not legally sell to Black people either.  When you do the math(s), the current disparity in wealth between Black and white in America can be, for the most part, put down to the results of these policies -- truly tragic.

It never occurred to me that the Ramsays owned the house, presumably because I was aware of the Stephens' lease in St Ives, though the Ramsays were of course (thank you, Mark Hussey) fictional, and not the Stephens.  Ahem. 

Mary Ellen

On Fri, Jul 3, 2020 at 12:03 AM Victoria Rosner via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

  Dear fellow Woolfians,

  As long as we're on the topic of Woolf and real estate, I wanted to share with the list a flyer offering a 30% discount for my newly-released book Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life (Oxford UP, 2020).  The book discusses Woolf throughout and has an entire chapter on Woolf's numerous experiments in architecture and design carried out at Monks House.  Woolfians might be interested to see Woolf's own sketches for renovation plans and builder blueprints for modifications to the house over a 20 year period.

  If the book passes muster with this learned group, I will be well content!

  all best,

  Victoria

  Victoria Rosner

  Dean of Academic Affairs, Columbia University School of General Studies

  Adj. Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

  Co-editor, Gender and Culture, Columbia University Press series

  Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life, Oxford University Press, 2020

  https://bookshop.org/books/machines-for-living-modernism-and-domestic-life/9780198845195

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  From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces+vpr4=columbia.edu at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
  Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2020 5:20:35 PM
  To: 'Woolf Listserv'
  Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Rent or own? 

  First of all, can anywhere be more obsessed with buying property than the UK?  (In a more familial way, Greece is unpretentiously enthusiastic.)  But this is a phenomenon that only started between the wars (esp. in the 1930s), and really took off after the war.

  Of course, we obsessives, when it is pointed out that European countries have large numbers of people renting, say: “Well, *someone* must own the properties”.  (Why not us?)

  But even the well-to-do often rented rather than bought.  At the end of 1924, the Hutchinsons had given up River House in Hammersmith ‘(in the manner of the period it was rented) in favour of a larger residence in Albert Road, Regent’s Park’.

  Mortgages – and there were mortgages – were not readily available for buying property.  You are more likely (in Trollope, say) to have bought a property, and now you have mortgaged it up to the hilt, owing to your gambling or poor returns on land (agricultural depression, as in “The Importance of Being Ernest”).

  What is the difference between renting a property and taking out a lease on a property?  Really, it’s just the legal implications of each – which differ as the years go on, and the govt deals with the tussle between landlords and tenants, one govt favouring one and another the other.  I think that someone with a lease might easily have said that “the rent was precisely twopence half-penny” (i.e. a peppercord rent), even tho’ they actually have a lease.

  In England and Wales, Land Law was radically overhauled in 1925.  VW wrote: ‘I’m so glad about Gavelkind’ (L3 554) - ‘A law of inheritance, peculiar to Kent, which divided an intestate’s property among all his sons’ (L3 554 n. 2).  Out went gavelkind, scot and lot, and lots of other obscure ways of “holding” land.  We now have only freehold and leasehold.  I have a leasehold of 999 years, which feels like freehold – ah, but you can’t have freehold of a flat because it doesn’t rest upon the ground.  For Land Law is about Land.

  I expect you’re no further forward, but I just had to “share”.

  Stuart

  From: Mark Hussey via Vwoolf 
  Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2020 9:02 PM
  To: 'Woolf Listserv' 
  Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Rent or own?

  But the Ramsays are fictional characters, so I’d stick with renting the house in the Hebrides…

  From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces at lists.osu.edu> On Behalf Of Neverow, Vara S. via Vwoolf
  Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2020 2:22 PM
  To: Woolf Listserv <vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>; Michael Schrimper <Michael.Schrimper at colorado.edu>
  Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Rent or own?

  The Stephen family had a lease...https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/exhibitions/stephen/37c.htm

       Talland House, plate 37c | Smith College Libraries

        Talland House, c.1882-1894 Anonymous. Click on this image to open it at full size in a new window. This is the front view of Talland House at St. Ives in Cornwall, England, where the Stephen family spent their summers.

        www.smith.edu

  Cheers,

  Vara

  Vara Neverow
  Department of English
  Southern Connecticut State University
  New Haven, CT 06515
  203-392-6717
  neverowv1 at southernct.edu

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  From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces+neverowv1=southernct.edu at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Michael Schrimper via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
  Sent: Thursday, July 2, 2020 2:13 PM
  To: Woolf Listserv <vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>
  Subject: [Vwoolf] Rent or own? 

  Do we know if the Ramsays were renting the house in the Hebrides, or if they owned it? I had always assumed their ownership of the place, for a number of reasons. Yet the text says “Never mind, the rent was precisely twopence half-penny; the children loved it; it did her husband good to be three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundred miles from his libraries and his lectures and his disciples” (29)…so they were renting the property? 

  I'm not finding any evidence that "rent" is another word for, say, mortgage payment....

  Edition I’m using: Harcourt 1990.

  Michael R. Schrimper 

  Ph.D. Student, Department of English

  University of Colorado Boulder

  Traditional Territories of the Cheyenne, Arapaho and Ute Nations

  https://www.colorado.edu/english/michael-schrimper

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