Kropotkin on home ownership
The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers - in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at minimum wage.
The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.
Moreover - and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring - the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town possessing bridges, quays, and fine public buildings.
A house in certain parts of Paris may be valued at thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds’ worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is today - a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.
Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice?
-Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, 1892