Hungry for Land

WESTERN EUROPE

In their drive to win Britain's upcoming elections, the Laborites have heavily stressed the fact that rising land prices are making it increasingly difficult for the average Briton to buy or build his own home. To dampen widespread land speculation, Italy's left-leaning government is pushing for a law that would permit cities to expropriate land in rapidly expanding urban areas. In France, where Parisian land has jumped 70% in value in five years, an unfathomable maze of tax law has been passed to discourage profiteers. All over Europe, inflation on top of prosperity has sent the price of land soaring and caused aroused governments to search for some way to put on the brakes.

Out of Boxes. In many cases, prices have risen beyond all reason. Land along Zurich's famous shopping street, the Bahnhofstrasse, is now worth $1,000 a square foot -- making it possibly the world's dearest land. The aver age cost of housing land in the London area has jumped from $24,640 an acre in 1951 to $173,040 an acre. It now takes $185 per square foot to get front age on Munich's Marienplatz, and hill top land outside Bonn that went for 10 per square foot five years ago now brings $4.65. On Spain's Costa del Sol, which has become almost honky-tonk as a result of a vast influx of tourists and land speculators, even rural land now sells for as much as $60,000 an acre--a price that the same lot in Florida's Coral Gables could not command.

The reasons for Europe's land rise are many: plentiful money searching for investment opportunities and for insurance against inflation, the rising resort business, a desperate need for more housing almost everywhere, and the desire of moneyed Europeans to break out of the tightly boxed cities. The entire Paris area has 3,200,000 dwelling units for a population of 8,500,000; some 500,000 of them have no running water and 1,400,000 no toilets. Yet rigid rent control laws and high mortgage rates (nearly 15%) discourage remodeling or new building. Around London, land use is dictated by community planning officials, who are dedicated to preserving an esthetically pleasing "green belt"; when they finally rule a piece of farm land free for building, the land value can jump overnight from $500 an acre to nearly $20,000. Occasional attempts by European governments to control or to tax land prices usually succeed in touching off a system of under-the-table payments that make mockery of the law.

Lebensraum with View. While speculators and anyone fortunate enough to own land are delighted by the sudden riches they find underfoot, the high prices have already slowed construction of badly needed middle- and low-income housing in West Germany, threaten to do the same elsewhere. The land lust has also produced a longdistance effect: a Florida land boom in West Germany. Germans seeking "Lebensraum with a View" are biting hard at tempting lures dangled by U.S. real estate men offering Florida land, sight unseen, for as little as 5 1/2-c- per square foot.

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