Journal of Architectural and Planning Research
9:4 (Winter, 1992)	320

ownership Baltimore's detached suburban cottages were almost always sold in freehold (R.
Alexander, 1975).

INVESTMENTS

The biggest difference between Baltimore and Birmingham, however, was the role of ground
rents in the investment market. The genius of the Baltimore ground rents was that once created
they became highly negotiable. They required little active management and in the event of non-
payment they were a first lien and well-secured.

Like bonds, ground rents increased in value during periods of deflation and went down in value
when interest rose. But quiescent investors preferred these modest fluctuations in value to the
much greater risks of panic, depression, and failure found in active trading. Indeed the investor
demand for ground rents was so great that critics charged it was withdrawing "capital from
manufacturing and other business enterprise" (Mayer, 1882: 130-132; Browne, 1980: 69-113).

In nineteenth century Birmingham, on the other hand, ground rents were rarely bought and
sold. Most were created by the great landlords who still respected the custom of primogeni-
ture. After "three lives", more-or-less, the improved property would revert and re-establish the
family's place in the aristocracy. Retention of the reversion was part of their rear guard effort
to preserve their hegemony.

Birmingham's investors looked elsewhere for investments. Many became rentiers. They as-
sumed the responsibilities of the prime lease for a block of dwelling units which they rented
short term to the masses. They filled every empty space with rooms to let. The difference be-
tween ground rents paid and weekly rents received was their profit (Chalklin, 1974: 157-174).

Conversely there was much less opportunity for Baltimore investors to become rentiers. Bal-
timore which claimed a 60% ownership rate (counting long term leaseholding as equivalent to
ownership), had less demand for residential landlords than Birmingham (Real Estate Board of
Baltimore, 1921).

POLITICS

The political fate of leaseholds also differed. Throughout the nineteenth century in Birmin-
gham the great landlords had been under attack by the capitalist leaders of industry. Landlor-
dism was blamed for "rubbish and dilapidation in whole quarters" (Briggs, 1963: 227).

Notwithstanding the anti-aristocratic rhetoric, long-term leasehold tenure survived the
nineteenth century. And the efforts by the captains of industry to blame leasehold tenure for
all matters of squalor and poverty seem self-serving and hollow. The capitalists attacked their
own landlord, Lord Calthorpe, for "taking tens of thousand a year from ground rents in
Edgbaston, which have been quadrupled in a comparatively short time, not by the energy or
skill or enterprise of the Calthorpe Family, but by the energy, enterprise and skill of the people
of Birmingham" (Briggs, 1963: 205). In their effort to belittle Calthorpe's entitlement they con-
veniently forgot that the leaseholds had helped to produce and finance the houses in which
they lived.