For many inner-city residents, depopulation, gentrification, or plant and base closings are just as random and devastating as floods or plagues. The social stability of these neighborhoods may be largely involuntary, created by economic and racial barriers to mobility. Most scholars who have written about common property have seen commoners as political and economic underdogs. A classic example is villagers defending their traditional forest grazing grounds against timber companies or government foresters who want to prohibit grazing to protect tree seedlings or prevent erosion. But commoners may also be prosperous or even highly privileged.
Commoners are by definition conservative.
To preserve their shared resources, they must exclude or expel anyone not willing to follow their land use rules. Although less comforting than the stereotype of downtrodden commoners who share and share alike, exclusionary commons may still be preferable to either privatization or state control. But in practice, both these options may speed up resource exhaustion. Private owners may extract the maximum cash value from their land as quickly as possible, rather than preserve resources for their own or anyone else's future use. He sees all residents in a jurisdiction as commoners who share an interest in maximizing local land values.