The Capitalized Value of Sunshine and Shade

Alexander MacKendrick

[Reprinted from the Single Tax Review, July-August 1915]

In my native city of Glasgow, Scotland, one of the main thoroughfares runs due North and South and has a street railway along its whole course with high class stores and business premises on both sides. For no immediately obvious reason, it has been remarkable during the past twenty years that the whole West side of the street has been the popular or fashionable one and that the business premises on that side have commanded much higher rents than those on the East side. This circumstance was for long a source of perplexity to me, and I had almost come to the conclusion that it was due to one of those freaks of fortune which seem to have no cause behind them; one of the things in short, which, to quote the words of the celebrated Lord Dimdreary, "no feller can understand." Having occasion, however, to go southward along this street frequently in the forenoon and northward again in the afternoon, I found myself unconsciously taking the West side in the morning because it enjoyed the full brightness of the cool morning sunshine, and returning in the afternoon on the same side of the street for the opposite reason, because it lay in shadow and was completely protected from the blazing post-meridian rays.

Of a sudden it flashed upon me, "here is the reason that the owners of property on this side can obtain about twice the rental per lineal front foot than the less fortunate proprietors on the other side can demand. The morning sun is desirable while the afternoon sun is not. The western side gets the one and escapes the other, and so the pedestrians at both times of the day prefer the West and the storekeepers compete for the locations where the window-gazers and possible purchasers parade.

With this clue to the mystery which had always seemed to surround the apparently capricious manner in which the situation- value distributes itself, I began to make observations on another of the main thoroughfares, which runs due East and West.

There the North side is always in sunshine and the South side always in shadow. How I asked myself, will the capitalized value of sunshine and shadow express itself here? The northern side gets the advantage of the cool morning sun, but has to endure the disadvantage of the scorching afternoon heat. The southern side misses the benefit of the sunshine in the early part of the day but enjoys the immense advantage of protection in the heat of the afternoon. Which (I asked myself) of those two advantages, both of which belong to the West side of the street first referred to, is the greater? I replied to my own question by saying that if I were a storekeeper I should certainly want to have the benefit of the cheerful morning sun, and would dread the destructiveness of the afternoon sunshine on my window goods, and that seeing I cannot have both advantages in this street I should prefer to remain always in shadow. Yes, I concluded, I would give a slightly higher rental but not much higher, for the shadow side. Having reached this conclusion inductively, I began to observe the facts and found my theory verified. While the situation values on the two sides were not so disparate as in the case of the North-and- South street, yet it became evident that a slight advantage remained with the South side which escaped the ruinous affect of the afternoon sun on its window goods. Slightly higher rents are obtainable, and the South side has established itself as the more fashionable one.

We sometimes say that if sunshine could be laid hold of and its value capitalized, it would be sold out in parcels just as land is. Do such examples as I have given, and which can be matched in every city, not prove that even sunshine is not exempt from the clutches of the fore-staller under the ill-balanced economic system under which we live? It is, of course, obvious that the benefits of municipal government and the spending of tax-raised money in street paving, lighting and sanitation, reflect themselves in increased values-of-position all over a city, but unequally according as each position happens to enjoy or does not enjoy the respective advantages of sunshine and shade. Does it not seem wildly unjust that the benefits of government which reflect themselves in these position-values should not be paid for by those who get the values, and in proportion to those values? In the case of the North-and-South street which first attracted my attention, justice demands that the proprietors on the West side should make double the contribution per lineal foot-front to the public expenses, as compared to the demand that should be made upon the East-side proprietors. Yet I can think of one enterprising proprietor on the unfashionable side who is certainly making a larger contribution per foot-front because of his having erected a handsome building, than another I have in my mind's eye who retains an old and inadequate two-story building on his much more valuable site on the fashionable side.

I trouble you with these personal memories in the hope they may stimulate some of your readers to make similar observations in American cities, and to realize how under present economic conditions even sunshine and shadow are capable of being monopolized and sold out to the highest bidder for private profit.