Community Land Trusts Research Articles

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: The Publicly Owned Variety of Community Land Trust

Contrasting cases in Toronto, New York, and Vancouver, we identify benefits and drawbacks associated with the publicly owned variety of community land trust, which we call a public land trust (PLT). Public ownership can obviate the need to finance a land sale, and enable sustained access to ongoing technical assistance and professional expertise, thereby reducing burdens on community capacity. While a degree of community control can also be maintained with public ownership, it may nonetheless be at greater risk when political winds change. In as much as PLTs secure affordable tenure and community control, they may warrant greater policy/planning consideration.

Moving to shared equity: locational outcomes for households in shared equity homeownership programs

The impact of U.S. housing policy on household locational outcomes has primarily been studied in the context of rental housing assistance programs, but the impact of alternative homeownership models is less fully explored. In this study, we assess residential trajectories for households that have participated in shared-equity homeownership (SEH) programs such as Community Land Trusts and Limited Equity Housing Cooperatives. We examine changes in neighborhood characteristics that occur when households enter and exit SEH units, and compare those outcomes with similar households that entered traditional homeownership or continued to rent. We find that while entering SEH is associated with decreases in neighborhood opportunity measures, exiting SEH is associated with improvements in key measures including lower concentrations of poverty. We conclude that while entering SEH may entail moving to lower-opportunity neighborhoods, participation in SEH programs increases the long-term economic and socio-spatial mobility of participating households by enabling them to access a broader array of neighborhood contexts in their subsequent move.

Community Land Trusts in Contexts of Informality: Process, politics and challenges of implementation

Informal settlements house a significant portion of the world's population, who frequently struggle due to lack of proper housing, urban infrastructure, and insecure tenure. This is an overwhelming reality in Global South countries, requiring alternatives to guarantee permanent and secure affordable housing to residents while promoting community empowerment and quality of life improvements. Community land trusts offer promise for housing struggles due to their mechanism of securing housing affordability permanently and their premise of community control of development. However, despite such promise, there are scarce experiences of community land trusts in contexts of informality. Based on recent and ongoing CLT implementation experiences in Puerto Rico and Brazil, we explore the process, politics, and challenges of community land trust implementation in informal settlements. We consider its potentiality to support housing struggles and mitigate long-lasting dispossession in different urban and housing realities throughout the urban Global South.

Community-led development and collective land tenure for environmental justice: the case of the Caño Martín Peña community land trust, Puerto Rico

ABSTRACT Community-led land ownership can contribute to environmental justice in disaster-prone areas, particularly as it protects vulnerable communities from market-driven displacement often occurring after natural disasters. The article reviews literature linking the climate emergency with disaster resilience and collective land-based models. It brings into focus the case of the Caño Martín Peña communities in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where residents started a Community Land Trust (CLT) in Latin America and the Caribbean, resulting from an extensive process of community participation. We highlight the importance of this case as still one of the only CLT’s in the Global South, a mechanism not yet sufficiently understood as a highly developed instrument for secure land tenure and adaptation to climate change in the Global South. We analyse the mechanisms by which the CLT’s collective tenure model effectively ensures greater environmental justice – both regarding ongoing flooding issues, and specific extreme natural events such as hurricanes. Collective land ownership allows residents to remain in the area despite forces of gentrification and displacement after disasters induced by global warming. We conclude with a reflection on the need for similar land-based solutions, and summon public authorities to consider these as a route to effective environmental management.

Interrupting Inequality Through Community Land Trusts

Relying on market-based housing policies has been inadequate to meet the need for affordable and sustainable housing and has heightened disparities in the housing system, especially along lines of race and gender. Community land trusts (CLTs) promise more equitable ways of providing stable, secure, and affordable housing for those marginalized in market-based housing. Yet there has been limited research comparing CLT housing with mainstream tenures. Using data from the first sample survey of CLT owners (N = 216) that includes comparison groups of market owners (N = 142) and renters (N = 130) drawn from similar low- and moderate-income populations, we find that those who purchase CLT homes are similar demographically to renters but compared with market owners are more likely to be Black and from households headed by women. We find no difference between CLT and market-rate homeowners in terms of benefits often attributed to homeownership, specifically financial well-being, stability, and a sense of house as home. CLT owners report having more time and resources to pursue desired activities than do market owners. Despite their demographic similarity to CLT owners, renters fare worse on all of these dimensions. We conclude with policy recommendations for housing tenures that provide permanent affordability, greater social equality and greater democratic resident control.

Bringing permanent affordable housing and community control to scale: The potential of community land trust and land bank collaboration

Community land trusts (CLTs) are a unique model of shared equity homeownership that promote equitable development and empower homebuyers in historically exclusive real estate markets. As a timely study about the potential future governance around affordable housing, the multiple case studies here identify places that have both a CLT and land bank, and where nascent initiatives by local governments focused on creating permanent affordable housing are facilitating collaborations between local CLTs and land banks. By exploring the themes and dynamics of these emerging collaborations with qualitative methods, the authors evaluate how CLTs can leverage collaborations with land banks as a tool to scale up permanent affordable housing and community control. Understanding how CLTs may benefit from collaborations with land banks is timely considering the current affordable housing crisis and an increasingly widespread recognition of systemic inequitable access to property ownership.

Neighbourhood Revitalisation and Heritage Conservation through Adaptive Reuse: Assessing Instruments for Commoning

ABSTRACT This contribution discusses experiences of civic initiatives with adaptive reuse in urban and rural settings. The contribution aims at understanding the implications of formal ownership instruments of commoning projects to address social needs and conserve heritage. In particular, we examine cases in which Heritable Building Lease (HBL), Community Land Trusts (CLT), and Community Ownership (CO) have been used as instruments for such commoning processes. These instruments are increasingly implemented for adaptive reuse projects with heritage buildings and sites to promote a long-term perspective of use. The case studies have an explicit ambition in opening up the site’s heritage to community engagement and to contribute to positive impacts on equitable and participatory neighbourhood development. The paper argues that the instruments play an important role in institutionalising commoning initiatives, but that formal tools are not enough as they have to mesh with informal processes. Moreover, professional expertise, time resources for volunteer engagement and idealistic motivations, are necessary preconditions for the use of these tools, yet they also show a selective bias towards the involvement of middle-class activists.

Virtues of Proximity

Whereas real estate-driven development tends to invest in singular and concentrated sites, resident-led development thrives in scattered patterns. The properties of community land trusts (CLTs) — one of the foremost models of resident-led development whereby land is claimed and used by a community without landlords — are almost always dispersed in a context where every property line is a potential obstacle to development. What these populist landholdings lack in terms of economy of scale is compensated for by virtues of proximity. This article examines the historic phenomena of property scattering and spatial patterns of CLTs across the US, articulating the possibility of designing patterns of scattered landholdings that support the values of resident-led development.

Real Estate Politik: Democracy and the Financialization of Social Networks

The power of social network platforms to amplify the scale, speed, and significance of everyday communication is increasingly weaponized against democracy. Analyses of social networks predominantly focus on design and its effects on politics. This article shifts the debate to their business model. Built as platform businesses, social networks are privately owned public spaces with structurally limited democratic affordances. Drawing from the history, theory, and practice of land use, I develop an analogy between the financialization of land by commercial real estate development and the financialization of attention by platform businesses. Historical policies, such as incentive zoning and exclusionary zoning, shed light on how platform businesses use systems of measurement and valuation to conflate users' roles, tokenize the incentives that drive behavior, and defer the ethical responsibilities businesses have to the public. While the real estate framing reveals social networks' structural flaws and colonial roots, lessons from urban planning, community land trusts, and Indigenous land stewardship can inform their regulation and reform. Building on the broader effort to embed ethics in the development of technology, I describe possibilities to steward social networks in the public interest.

Shared projects and symbiotic collaborations: Shenzhen and London in comparative conversation

This paper presents ‘shared projects’ and the ‘symbiotic’ relations they engender to capture accounts of state and society actors collaborating to turn individual constraints into collective opportunities for pursuing urban experiments which are institutionally-shaped but also institution-shaping. The concepts are developed through a sequential and recursive comparison – that is, a ‘comparative conversation’– between a case of urban village upgrading in Shenzhen and Community Land Trust Development in London. The paper uses a pragmatist approach to capitalist transformation as a starting point for comparison between these supposedly ‘incomparable’ cases. I build both heterogeneous and generalisable accounts of the pathways and progressive potential of collaborations on shared projects by recursively composing analytical proximities across the cases and their contexts of state entrepreneurialism and austerity localism. Theoretically, this paper contributes to scholarship which focuses on the contingency and complexity inherent in urban transformation. State and society actors are seen as potential collaborators working pragmatically to solve systemic problems without necessarily targeting wholesale systemic change. Methodologically, it contributes to ongoing attempts to demonstrate the positive relationship between experimental comparisons and conceptual innovation through staging a ‘comparative conversation’.

Community Control in the Housing Commons: A Conceptual Typology

We advance theorizing on the governance of the commons through a configurative comparative analysis (CCA) of community control in the housing commons. We focus our analysis on community land trusts (CLTs), which are increasingly recognised as a potential governance mechanism for collective access to housing provision for low-income communities. Through systematic comparative analysis of CLTs in the US and UK, we extend the existing evidence base and develop a conceptual typology of community control in the housing commons. The typology suggests that whilst some social purposes for CLTs may align with notions of the commons – enrichment of community politics, conservation of community life, or creation of participatory governance – other CLTs focus on housing provision as a means of making a broader contribution to the social economy, or as an asset-lock to enable wider provision for affordable housing. By understanding this differentiation, we challenge the assumption that design principles or governance mechanisms are sufficient for or inherently offer a singly clear route to community control, and recognise that community control is achieved through different pathways informed by the multiple configurations of dynamics between different aspects of governance, as usefully illuminated by CCA. Our approach demonstrates the value to scholarship and activism on the commons of systematic comparative analysis in order to interrogate the expansion of the commons not only in practice but in spirit.

Community Land Trusts: A Case for an Expansive View of Reparations for Black Americans

Community Land Trusts: A Case for an Expansive View of Reparations for Black Americans

Rewilding and repeopling in Scotland: Large-scale land managers’ perspectives and practices

In this paper, I examine two alternative responses to the depopulation of marginal rural areas: ‘repeopling’ (repopulation) and ‘rewilding’ (often defined as ecosystem restoration via mammal reintroductions). Specifically, I aim to clarify large-scale land managers' perspectives on rewilding and repeopling, as well as how these perspectives relate to their land management practices. I focus my research on Scotland for three reasons: (1.) it is a country with significant marginal rural areas; (2.) it hosts many large-scale landowners; and (3.) ‘rewilding’ and ‘repeopling’ are present in the country's political discourse. To answer my research questions, I conducted structured interviews with eight large-scale land managers (representing conservation NGOs, community land trusts, and private estates) in a single marginal rural area in the Scottish Highlands. I conducted a thematic analysis of their perspectives on rewilding and repeopling, as well as their land management practices. In relation to perspectives, I found that ‘rewilding’ is a controversial term in the study site, and this controversy seems in part to relate to the term's diverse, often ambiguous, interpretations. Repeopling was more broadly supported, though with qualifications. In relation to land management practices, I found that conservation activities were dominant in the study site. From a political ecological perspective, the prominence of conservation activities even on lands managed by interviewees who opposed rewilding might be seen as an example of territorialisation by conservation actors. In contrast, one interviewee focused on renewable energy development which, by bridging conservation and repopulation concerns, could be interpreted as an instance of counterterritorialisation.

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) as a strategy to promote affordable housing in California

In an effort to combat systemic racism in land use planning and inequitable real estate investment activities that have oppressed the working class, low-income communities are finding creative ways to build community wealth. As exorbitant rents push families out of their homes and neighborhoods, grassroots groups and communities of color are pursuing Community Land Trusts (CLTs) to promote community stewardship of the land and to create access to permanently affordable housing. While a majority of CLTs focus on fostering permanently affordable housing, there is great flexibility in the kinds of land uses that CLTs can pursue, including for instance, agricultural projects. In California, grassroots organizations such as THRIVE Santa Ana and the Oakland Community Land Trust (OakCLT) are putting the CLT model into practice to respond to their communities’ needs and pave the way for disinvested communities to secure housing access.

Ownership is a habit of mind: how community land trusts expose key consensual fictions of urban property

ABSTRACT Community land trusts (“CLTs”) have garnered attention as a novel, non-state organizational mechanism for enabling permanently affordable homeownership. In canonical form, they separate a home from the land upon which it sits, holding the land in trust and selling the home for its value without the land. Additionally, CLTs use ground lease restrictions to constrain the resale process and enforce long-term reproduction of affordability. Herein, we argue that given the “actually existing” character of CLT practices, the legal vocabulary CLTs use is not most directly nor most accurately descriptive. The nature of the present intervention is emphatically not to say that CLTs have acted in bad faith; rather, we identify a set of fictions about land and rights encoded into the law regarding real property. Our intervention highlights how the nature of these fictions theoretically constrains the power of canonical community land trusts to transform society and forces critical reflection on specific financial strategies CLTs may attempt.

Planning for place: Place attachment and the founding of rural community land trusts

This paper explores the role of place attachment in motivating residents of rural communities to form community land trusts (CLTs). CLTs are non-profit community-led organisations formed and managed by volunteers. Their objectives typically relate to the provision of affordable housing. Using qualitative interview data collected from 8 CLTs in rural England, this paper highlights the ways in which their founding members mobilise place attachments to form CLTs, define and target beneficiaries, and acquire resources to facilitate affordable housing development. Founding members perceive CLT housing as a vehicle through which visions and attachments of place can be articulated, using restrictions on resales, lettings and use to enhance and maintain place attachments whilst challenging conventional logics of market housing provision. While CLT objectives are explicitly derived from a desire to maintain, protect and enhance social and functional bonds to place, strong emphases on place attachment in the planning and allocation of rural housing may deny housing opportunities to those without such attachments.

Dwelling activism: making the personal political in the English home through a feminist dwelling lens

Inspired by feminist literature on the notion of ‘dwelling’, this paper asks: how does the personal dimension of dwelling relate to the political discourses of housing activism. The aim of this paper is to (re-)consider the political dimensions of housing activism and research through focussing on the intimate and private experiences of ‘being at home’, thereby extending and pluralising housing activism as ‘dwelling activism’. Methodologically, this paper ‘throws together’ two data sets. The first is an arts-based study on the intimate experiences of feeling at home that was conducted with 18 mental health service users in the UK. The second study interviewed 14 urban community land trust activists in England about community engagement and housing activism. A plural, disintegrative analysis offers a symbiotic reading of the close entanglement between the inward-facing personal practices of dwelling like building shelter and security, and the outward-facing more public practices of dwelling, like building relations and togetherness.

Gil Fagiani: Friend, Mentor, Activist, Poet

Research Article| January 01 2021 Gil Fagiani: Friend, Mentor, Activist, Poet Stephen Siciliano; Stephen Siciliano STEPHEN SICILIANO has been writing professionally for forty years. As a journalist he has worked for the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., L.A. Business Journal, L.A. Weekly, L.A. Downtown News, and Bloomberg Law. He is the author of two novels, Vedette or Conversations with the Flamenco Shadows, and The Sidewalk Smokers Club. His manuscript on the life and times of Rep. Vito Marcantonio, The Goodfather, is being readied for publication. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Gene Bild; Gene Bild GENE BILD, a Chicago-born “red diaper baby,” has worked for more than seven decades to realize the aims of his extended family of progressive social activists. As an eight-year-old, he marched for nuclear disarmament, and as a sixteen-year-old, he was arrested at sit-ins to desegregate Chicago public schools. In Chicago’s Grant Park, he protested amid tear gas during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. After White Lightning disbanded, Bild campaigned for the late Harold Washington, the first Black mayor of Chicago. After earning an MS at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, Bild taught math for twenty-six years in a public high school. There he helped his students form a Gay-Straight Alliance chapter and his colleagues organize a teachers’ union. Now retired, Bild spends his spare time encouraging select politicians to join him in retirement. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Gerald Meyer; Gerald Meyer GERALD MEYER, a founding member of the faculty of Hostos Community College (CUNY), authored Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician 1902-1954 (SUNY Press, 1989), co-edited The Lost World of Italian American Radicalism: Politics, Labor, and Culture (Praeger, 2003), and has published more than ninety articles and reviews on a wide range of subjects. Meyer serves on the editorial boards of Socialism and Democracy and Science and Society, has appeared in a number of documentaries, reviews manuscripts for publication, and lectures widely. Meyer has been politically active since he was a teenager. Currently he is co-chair of the Vito Marcantonio Forum. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Roger D. Harris; Roger D. Harris ROGER D. HARRIS attended Cornell University as an undergraduate and the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate school. He did community organizing in East Harlem with Gil Fagiani. He taught political science at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. A certified wildlife biologist, he is now active working on conservation and human rights issues, including with the Task Force on the Americas, US Peace Council, and the Council of Hemispheric Affairs. He regularly writes for Counterpunch, MintPress News, Dissident Voice, and Transcend Media Service. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google James Tracy James Tracy JAMES TRACY teaches at City College of San Francisco. He is the co-author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times (Melville House, 2011), and No Fascist USA! The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee and Lessons for Today’s Movements (City Lights, 2020). He authored Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes From San Francisco’s Housing Wars (AK Press, 2014). He was part of the Italian-American Political Solidarity Club, which mobilized Italian Americans against racism and produced the book Avanti Popolo: Italian-Americans Sail Beyond Columbus (Manic D Press, 2007). Tracy is the co-founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and serves as the political director for the American Federation of Teachers 2121. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Italian American Review (2021) 11 (1): 55–67. https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.11.1.0055 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stephen Siciliano, Gene Bild, Gerald Meyer, Roger D. Harris, James Tracy; Gil Fagiani: Friend, Mentor, Activist, Poet. Italian American Review 1 January 2021; 11 (1): 55–67. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/italamerrevi.11.1.0055 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressItalian American Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Promise of Property: Legal Optimism and Collective Efficacy in Chicago’s Urban Agriculture District

AbstractThis article explains how and why community organizers in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood have found promise in the opportunities that property law provides for addressing community problems. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, it examines the creation of neighborhood institutions for Chicago’s first urban agriculture district. These institutions have been informed by memories of slavery and sharecropping, and of the role played by food production and economic cooperation in struggles for African American self-determination. To keep ownership, use, and benefits of urban farmland local, organizers in Englewood founded a community land trust as a way to cultivate a sense of community ownership and control, and as a way to chip away at the alienation that blocks residents from addressing local problems. Prior studies have linked collective efficacy and residents’ individual sense of ownership; the experience in Englewood points to how collective efficacy could also be fostered by institutions that demonstrate collective, African-American ownership of community resources. The article discusses why organizers and residents in race-class subjugated communities may find promise in the sense of sovereignty and legal agency afforded by property.

O cooperativismo habitacional e a gestão coletiva da propriedade como garantia da segurança da posse de populações vulnerabilizadas: O Community Land Trust

O Community Land Trust é um modelo estabelecido com vistas à proteçãode permanência de comunidades vulnerabilizadas em certos territórios. A figurasurge nos EUA, na década de 60, atrelada aos movimentos por direitos civis eà população residente em áreas rurais. O presente artigo buscará avaliar aspotencialidades e os limites da aplicação do instrumento do “Community LandTrust"; no Brasil enquanto prática alinhada aos Objetivos de DesenvolvimentoSustentável (ODS) de “Cidades e Comunidades Sustentáveis”, principalmentequando se trata de um espaço urbano marcado por elevados percentuais deirregularidade e por uma grave situação de desigualdade socioespacial. Talprática se destaca por exigir uma gestão coletiva territorial a qual encontra nocooperativismo habitacional elementos e práticas contemporâneas deautogestão e o modelo que melhor representa valores como a ajuda mútua,democracia, igualdade e solidariedade.