Narratives of Urban Resistance: The Community Land Trust

Udi Engelsman,

doi:10.14324/111.444.amps.2016v9i1.001

Abstract

A small part of the self-help housing campaign has been the slow emergence of the Community Land Trust (CLT) movement. CLTs are heterogeneous in terms of their scale and urban/rural contrast and because the motivations behind their inception appear to be so different. We outline the contradiction between housing as the process of activism and housing as a commodity. This is important because we see in the former means by which community organizing can be explained, but show the former to be understood in terms of class analysis. We then consider activism through the four phases of direct action suggested by Ward and go on to look specifically at two CLTs, both in major US cities. These two cases, one in New York and one in Boston, offer an insight into why a particular type of community organizing took place. We see a stand against gentrification in the heart of Manhattan, radical action to secure the ownership of land and to prevent displacement in a Lower East Side neighbourhood. In contrast, the second case shows a stand against the violence exerted in the degeneration of a South Boston neighbourhood. Here we see a community conversant with civil rights struggles able to secure the compliance of the local state through their direct action. Narratives of resistance, we suggest, rely on activists and professionals who both share similar aims and develop a symbiotic relationship in resisting the hegemony of private capital and the state.

Highlights

Since Engels wrote about the housing question, problems of cost and quality have remained and processes of gentrification in many major cities have intensified
We derive our main points from a small number of interviews that show how land was secured for housing in the form of a Community Land Trust (CLT) and use detail from the dialogue to consider the roles of community activism and of professionals, of resistance and cooperation in struggles over the housing question today
We find a language of advocacy which is more than a professional buy-in to the principles of the CLT and of the activism behind it: Yes so my role here is both maintaining the Community Land Trust and looking for other opportunities to promote the Land Trust model both within the neighbourhood and in other neighbourhoods in other areas of the city and beyond and to work with our residents and committees to look for economic development strategies, especially around work force, around jobs, and around you know anything that can be done to boost the local economy still in a way that is benefiting the local residents

Summary

Introduction

Since Engels wrote about the housing question, problems of cost and quality have remained and processes of gentrification in many major cities have intensified. For Engels, housing was a class question and it remains a contested terrain, a verb or a noun; the former describing housing as a process to include the active behaviour of securing housing in a collective sense, while the latter is used to describe housing as a commodity, the basis of home ownership. It is the latter that dominates with housing markets of such importance that they were central to the financial crisis of 2007/08 and the Great Recession that followed. As Ward suggests, incorporation by the state is the inevitable outcome short of revolutionary change.

Ideology and Struggle

Narratives of Resistance

Findings

Conclusion