ABSTRACT
Comprehensive powers to acquire sites for local authority house building were first introduced in the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act. From time to time these were amended and since 1957 councils have used the procedure contained in the Housing Act of that year which consolidated previous legislation. A full description of the legal position would require a book in itself but the basic position is fairly straightforward. The theory of land rent and land prices is a difficult and controversial field of political economy. If one can avoid becoming confused by the incidental minutiae, the legal position on site acquisition prices is quite straightforward. The extreme and extraordinary paucity of data makes it impossible to say anything useful about either regional variations in municipal site acquisition costs or intra-urban variations. Town density relates to all the land within the urban boundary.
