GROUND RENT A SOCIAL PRODUCT 13 
Ground rent may be said to result from at least 
three distinct causes, all connected with aggregated 
social activity: 
(1) Public expenditure: All wise public 
expenditures are direct feeders of ground rent. 
Streets, lights, water, sewerage, fire and police systems, 
public schools, libraries, museums, parks and play 
grounds, all contribute to enhance the value of land, 
and a corresponding depreciation would follow the 
abolition of any of these systems. It follows, there 
fore, that expenditure for maintaining these services 
constitutes the maintenance of ground rent, if not 
in a literal sense, at least in an all-sufficient common 
sense. 
(2) Quasi-public expenditure; In the same way, 
the expenditure by the municipality or by private 
corporations for steam and electric railways, gas and 
electric lights, telegraph and telephone facilities, 
subways and ferries, contributes to the value of land, 
at least to the extent of their actual cost. 
(3) Private expenditure; Equally, and by parity 
of reasoning, private or voluntary social expenditure 
for churches, private schools, colleges and universities, 
all private buildings, apartment houses, stores, and 
office buildings, contributes to ground rent, the annual 
value of land. 
In an enumeration of the causes of ground rent, 
population is usually the one first named. But a 
passive population gives little value to land; it is 
rather the activities consequent upon the character 
population that create the value. 
It is generally conceded that, as a matter of fact, 
ground rent is what land is worth annually for use;