Community Land Trusts Research Articles

The Housing Crisis and the Working Poor: Problems and Solutions from the Community Level

This paper is about the housing crisis, both the endemic crisis that makes decent affordable housing an unrealizable dream for one-third of all American households, and the housing bubble that burst in 2006 forcing millions of working poor homeowners into foreclosure. It is written from the perspective of the working poor, a perspective that is sorely lacking in the national debate around housing. The information presented is grounded in a thorough review of the academic literature combined with our collective experiences in real life housing foreclosures. Based on calculations by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, we develop a simple formula for calculating the bank costs for the foreclosure/eviction/REO liquidation process. We offer a creative alternative that saves banks money while also stabilizing families and neighborhoods — donation of properties to community-based organizations. Finally, we outline a functioning Community Land Trust and we invite financial institutions to discuss collaborations that can improve the bank’s bottom line while also keeping families out of poverty. We draw the following important conclusions: •The working poor, especially people of color, suffered the greatest losses from the current housing crisis, while real estate speculators are the only winners. •The foreclosure/eviction process sentences working poor families to lives of poverty and has negative impacts on entire neighborhoods. •In one-third to one-half of foreclosure cases in low income neighborhoods, banks lose more by proceeding with foreclosure than be simply donating the properties to community groups. In section 4, we outline an alternative to foreclosure — donation of unprofitable properties to Community Land Trusts. We address several possible concerns about this approach to loss mitigation, and we invite the major financial institutions in the US to discuss with us the donation option as an alternative to foreclosure. This paper is researched and written by members of the Casas del Pueblo Community Land Trust, part of the Centro Autonomo community center located on the north side of Chicago in Albany Park. The Centro Autonomo membership is largely Latino, and Albany Park is a majority Latino neighborhood, though also said to be the third most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the US. The community center is focused on four principal areas that are critical to the lives of working immigrants: education (adult high school, ESL and computer classes, gender workshop), work (women’s house-cleaning cooperative), health (community clinic), and housing. Both Casas del Pueblo and the Centro Autonomo are projects of the Mexico-US Solidarity Network, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization registered in the State of Illinois.

Scaling-up or going viral? Comparing self-help housing and community land trust facilitation

Community-led housing organisations innovate in the resolution of local housing issues by adopting a specialised local focus and emphasising community leadership and engagement. In order to meet their objectives they require access to finance, skills and legitimacy; resources that are often secured through frameworks of intermediary support and external partnerships. This article uses two sector-based case studies of community land trusts (CLTs) and self-help housing to explore the importance and effect of intermediary support in securing access to these resources. These sectors have grown in size and importance in recent years through different forms of intermediation that replicate community-led housing in different locations. The article compares the ‘scaling-up’ of CLTs and the viral spread of self-help housing, highlighting differences in the emphasis that each approach places on community leadership and links with technical experts. We then discuss the implications of this for future housing initiatives and wider relevance for facilitating community-led innovation.

Reinventing Real Estate

The community land trust (CLT) is a social invention designed to solve several problems in land ownership, from affordability to preservation. This article traces the history of the CLT from concept to implementation, through a network of theorists and activists, and discusses the present extent of CLTs in the United States. It concludes with a case study of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), a community development organization in Boston, that has used the CLT model as part of its holistic strategy to redevelop a neighborhood that has suffered from redlining, arson, and abandonment. DSNI is perhaps the only community organization in the United States to have attained the power of eminent domain to acquire land for housing development.

Pushing back the frontiers of property: Community land trusts and low-income housing in urban Kenya

Property lies at the heart of the urban development process. While it creates the wealth needed to finance the urban economy, property can also be a source of disenfranchisement, especially among those unable to cope with the rules set by the market and facilitated by government policy. The hegemony of individual property particularly presents a paradox. Whereas individualised tenure theoretically confers the highest possible benefits in the property rights bundle, individualisation can also precipitate a wave of dispossession among poor households unable to neither meet stringent development regulations nor withstand market vicissitudes. This paper explores the possibility of developing alternative forms of property capable of meeting the practical housing needs of the urban poor. Specifically, the paper discusses the community land trust (CLT) as an innovative form of property capable of facilitating low-income housing provision. Based on an analysis of the Tanzania-Bondeni community land trust recently implemented in Voi, we argue that CLTs constitute a powerful innovation for low-income housing provision in urban Kenya. However, CLTs employ an intricate legal framework and institutional design that can be daunting, while their long-term success demands community commitment and effective leadership that may be hard to guarantee.

Inclusionary Eminent Domain

This Article proposes a paradigm shift in takings law, namely “inclusionary eminent domain.” This new normative concept provides a framework that molds eminent domain takings and economic redevelopment into an inclusionary land assembly model equipped with multiple tools to help guide municipalities, private developers and communities construct or preserve affordable housing developments. The tools to achieve this include Community Benefit Agreements (“CBAs”), Land Assembly Districts (“LADs”), Community Development Corporations (“CDCs”), Land Banks (“LABs”), Community Land Trusts (“CLTs”) and Neighborhood Improvement Districts (“NIDs”). The origin of the concept derives from the zoning law context, where exclusionary zoning in the suburbs excluded affordable housing for the poor. Courts intervened, applying exclusionary zoning doctrines, which led to the enactment of inclusionary zoning programs to achieve a fair share of housing. Exclusionary eminent domain in urban areas, similarly, has displaced and decreased the stock of or denied access to affordable housing through the power of takings. Under an exclusionary eminent domain doctrine, courts would apply heightened review to condemnations in a locality that has less than its fair share of affordable housing. But in a post-Kelo era of takings, doctrinal solutions may not be enough. Analogous to inclusionary zoning, inclusionary eminent domain helps us rethink how to fix the exclusionary eminent domain phenomenon that displaces low-income residents. Indeed, this Article moves us beyond the doctrinal muddle and instead incorporates both the intellectual musings of takings and zoning law with an assessment of how innovative tools can be practically applied to construct and preserve affordable housing in eminent domain takings for economic redevelopment.

Enhancing the analysis of rural community resilience: Evidence from community land ownership

Resilience, and specifically the resilience of (rural) communities, is an increasingly-ubiquitous concept, particularly in the contexts of resistance to shocks, climate change, and environmental disasters. The dominant discourse concerning (community) resilience centres around bounce-back from external shocks. In this paper, I argue that it is necessary to query this dominant, singular conceptualisation for two main reasons. Firstly, through reviewing the international literature, it is possible to construct a spectrum of (community) resilience research concepts from ‘reactive bounce-back’ through to ‘proactive human agency’, where the latter increasingly questions the reactive stance of much community resilience analysis. Secondly, the new findings I present from 17 community land trusts (CLTs) in Scotland demonstrate processes of proactive change being implemented by communities-of-place, rather than simply as reactions to external shocks or events. Communities' aimed-for outcomes are far wider than shock-absorption, and include deliberately building their skills and capacity-base in a context of constant change, rather than in anticipation of singular events.As a result of bringing together empirical findings with a wider review of the resilience literature, I conclude that to persist with only the dominant narrative of a reactive, shock-related definition of (community) resilience unnecessarily constrains our analysis, since it bypasses evident proactive processes and wider adaptability outcomes. I further conclude that we need to continue to problematise resilience as a concept, in order to be more accurate with its usage. This is important in itself, and, I argue, a necessary precursor to enhancing dialogue between resilience and other concepts such as social capital.

Keeping "Community" in a Community Land Trust

This instrumental case study examined the role of grassroots community in a community land trust (CLT) in a southern U.S. city. Twenty-nine homeowners, renters, board members, community members, and current and former CLT employees were interviewed. addition, two focus groups of 11 and six participants composed of CLT residents and other neighborhood residents were conducted. All comments were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using NVivo software. Analysis revealed that community was helpful if not necessary for community building in the subject CLT. This study enhances our knowledge of CLTs and the ways they contribute community change and offers lessons learned other, especially budding, CLTs. KEY WORDS: affordable housing; community land trusts; community ********** The primary focus of community land trusts (CLTs) is affordable housing for individuals and communities. the classic CLT model, a low-income individual or family becomes a member of the CLT, buys a house in the CLT, and leases the land on which the house sits from the CLT. A primary concern of the CLT is ownership for the common good rather than what is best for individuals (Krinsky & Hovde, 1996). Thus, CLTs offer a unique form of community development. Although the primary focus of CLTs is affordable housing, it is important understand that they are also meant meet other core principles outlined by the National Community Land Trust network, including to increase long-term community control of neighborhood resources [and] empower residents through involvement and participation in the (National Community Land Trust Network, n.d., para. 2). An article-length overview of CLTs is available (Gray, 2008), as is a book-length document (Davis, 2006) for readers who wish learn more about CLTs. There have been very few empirical studies of CLTs, and there is even less in the literature on the role of community in CLTs. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative used community quite effectively build its organization and empower its residents; most notably, the city of Boston granted them the authority of eminent domain, and they remain the only nonprofit in the country hold this power (Medoff & Sklar, 1994). Other research on CLTs has not specifically discussed community (Angotti, 2007; Davis & Demetrowitz, 2003; Davis & Stokes, 2009; Krinsky & Hovde, 1996; Packnett, 2005). A 2007 survey of CLTs asked one question regarding community organizing, framed as organizing (Sungu-Eryilmaz & Greenstein, 2007). Three of 120 CLTs reported anti-crime as a major component of their program activities, and 23 reported it was a minor component. Also examined was the involvement of the CLT in advocacy, which was not defined (and policy advocacy may or may not involve community organizing). More CLTs than not were involved in policy advocacy: 23 reported it as a major component, and 58 reported it as a minor one. There are nonempirical accounts of CLTs using community organizing. For example, the Sawmill CLT in Albuquerque, New Mexico, formed out of a long history of community against nearby factory pollution (Davis, 2006). Although community is not the only means achieve the core principles of long-term community control and empowerment of residents that the National Community Land Trust Network endorses, it is certainly a proven model for doing so. Community has a long, solid history of teaching people how gain power achieve the changes they want and need (Rubin & Rubin, 2008). Community builds leaders and relationships, empowers individuals, and creates organizations that act for social change (Bobo, Kendall, & Max, 1991; Kahn, 1991; Rubin & Rubin, 2008). In the United States community development stands in stark contrast community organizing (Stoecker, 2003, p. …

A New Way Forward: Native Nations, Nonprofitization, Community Land Trusts, and the Indigenous Shadow State

Indigenous sovereignty has been both expanded and restricted in the current self-determination era of federal Indian policy in the United States. This has allowed both the expansion and strengthening of indigenous governments, as well as the continued successful efforts to restrict and regulate these sovereign indigenous nations. The existing models of governance, development, and planning fail to adequately account for these challenges to the fundamental legitimacy of indigenous governments. I propose the model of the ‘indigenous shadow state’ based around community land trusts and other indigenously-controlled nonprofit organizations, as a complementary model, to compensate for these challenges as a means of ensuring the long term viability of indigenous social and political institutions. I discuss how a community land trust can be utilized to perform the role of a government and serve the long term needs of its citizens in the areas of housing, economic development, and land reclamation. I also briefly discuss how this model can be applied in the urban context.

Social Sustainability in Urban Areas – Communities, Connectivity and the Urban Fabric

Introduction 1. Understanding Social Sustainability: Key Concepts and Developments in Theory and Practice Part 1: Communities, Neighbourhoods and the Creation of Locality-Based Social Capital Introduction to Part 1 2. Creating Sustainable Neighbourhoods? The Development and Management of Mixed-Income Communities 3. Building Sustainable Communities from the Grassroots: How Community Land Trusts can Create Social Sustainability 4. Neighbourhood Asset Management: Life Cycles and Learning for Social Sustainability 5. Women's Social Networks and their Importance in Promoting Sustainable Communities Part 2: The Role of Place and Connectivity in the Urban Socio-Physical Environment Introduction to Part 2 6. Residential Intensification, Family Housing and Educational Provision 7. Transport Planning for Sustainable Communities 8. The Impacts of Teleworking on Sustainability and Travel Part 3: Regeneration and Economic Development Introduction to Part 3 9. Planning Obligations and Social Sustainability 10. The Urban Renaissance and the Night-Time Economy - Who Belongs in the City at Night? 11. The Relationship between Major Events, the Urban Fabric and Social Sustainability 12. Conclusions and Observations for Future Practice

Perspectives on utilising Community Land Trusts as a vehicle for affordable housing provision

With lack of affordable housing being clearly identified as a social and economic exclusion issue for most communities, innovative ways of addressing this deficiency should be considered. Increasingly local communities are engaging with the possibility of direct provision themselves and discussion around this notion has profound implications for community cohesion. One community-based solution gaining popular support within communities, and with government ministers, is the Community Land Trust mechanism. This involves control and ownership of land to help ensure affordable housing is built and remains affordable in perpetuity for the community. The language and difficulties with definition of terms, together with the complexity of engaging relevant stakeholders in a changing policy and legislative framework can be problematic. This may lead to apparent lack of consensus within communities on the way forward. Perceptions of local housing issues and ways to address them are sometimes vague, sometimes diverse but rarely apathetic. This paper includes data from two case studies in North East England, which are examined using interviews with key players, as a means of seeking some practical solutions.

Research Article: Community Revitalization Through Areawide Brownfield Regeneration, Community Land Trusts, and Progressive Finance

Many successful residential and other redevelopments have appeared at individual brownfield sites, yet the larger transformation of mixed-use urban neighborhoods distressed with numerous smaller, l...

Community Land Trusts in the United States

ABSTRACT Land trusts are a means to conserve land and/or wildlife (e.g., donating one's farm to The Nature Conservancy) or encourage affordable homeownership and local control of land. The topic of this article is the latter type of land trusts, called Community Land Trusts (CLTs), that have been touted as an innovative means to provide and preserve affordable housing. Through a synthesis of the literature, this article introduces social workers to CLTs. This includes defining Community Land Trusts, reporting on their brief history in the United States, discussing their advantages and disadvantages, and examining the limited empirical evidence. This review suggests that Community Land Trusts are an arena for future social work practice and research.

The Community Land Trust as a Highway Environmental Impact Mitigation Tool

ABSTRACT:The proposed Newtown Pike Extension in Lexington, Kentucky, has the potential to cause significant displacement of low-income residents. Following Executive Order 12898, federal agencies have been required to consider environmental justice impacts of their policies and activities. Highway planners in Lexington have crafted a mitigation strategy that includes a community land trust, which is intended to provide permanent protection for the low-income community to be affected by the highway extension. Although the community land trust may be an attractive option for maintaining housing affordability and community cohesion, the idea must overcome some significant hurdles if it is going to be useful as an environmental impact mitigation tool. One problem is selling the idea of communal land ownership to African American and low-income households. Part of the challenge is to design a method for sharing capital gains that gives an adequate return to home buyers while maintaining affordability. Another difficulty concerns renters who are eligible for only limited relocation subsidies that in many cases will not be enough to cover the cost of new rental housing.

Tinkering with tenure: the community land trust experiment in Voi, Kenya

Projects to secure land rights for the urban poor have been implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa for over 30 years. A recurrent issue in such projects is the provision of sustainable land tenure for beneficiaries. Commonly, individual titles with restrictions on resale have been used. Despite these, recipients often sell their land rights to more affluent city dwellers exacerbating the growth of slums (Habitat Int 11 (1987) 173). Policymakers are investigating alternative tenure forms, including community-based institutions, which they hope will make ownership of land more affordable and sustainable for the urban poor.The paper presents an analysis of an informal settlement upgrading project in Voi, Kenya in which the Community Land Trust (CLT) model was used to provide tenure security (Land Use Policy 14(3) (1997) 215). The paper reviews why the CLT model was entertained as a tenure alternative and evaluates how the model has performed in a 6-year period of operation in meeting various objectives including providing affordable, sustainable land ownership and preventing absenteeism. The implementation experience of a sister project in Kilifi, Kenya that utilized individual leasehold tenure as an ownership form is presented as a counter example to the Voi experience.The paper shows that despite provisions for strong community control, the CLT model has not been able to achieve the above goals. A variety of reasons are given for the model's poor performance, including the legal complexity of the model, a lack of on-going governmental support for the model and the project, and the divisive issue of land allocation for remaining parcels of land within the settlement. The paper concludes that on-going experimentation with the CLT model is not advisable at this time. Rather, the paper recommends that planners involved in informal settlement upgrading need to understand and recognize informal or customary institutions and try to incorporate them into de jure institutions in order to enhance tenure security and better manage urban land (Reforming urban land policies and institutions in developing countries. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1992; Habitat Int 25 (2001) 415).

Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern

Wars. Somanywars.Wars outside andwars inside.Culturalwars, science wars, and wars against terrorism.Wars against poverty andwars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm?What has become of the critical spirit? Has it run out of steam? Quite simply, my worry is that it might not be aiming at the right target. To remain in the metaphorical atmosphere of the time, military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, and technology of their projectiles, their smart bombs, theirmissiles; I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those sorts of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. Are wenot like thosemechanical toys that endlesslymake the samegesturewhen everything else has changed around them? Would it not be rather terrible if we were still training young kids—yes, young recruits, young cadets—for wars that are no longer possible, fighting enemies long gone, conquering territories that no longer exist, leaving them ill-equipped in the face of threats we had not anticipated, for whichwe are so thoroughlyunprepared? Generals have always been accused of being on the ready one war late— especially French generals, especially these days. Would it be so surprising,

Property rights—and responsibilities? The case of Kenya

This paper takes forward the findings of an earlier study (Community Land Trusts and other tenure innovations in Kenya. In: Payne, G. (Ed.), Land, Rights and Innovation: Improving Tenure Security for the Urban Poor, ITDG Publishing, London, 2002, pp. 233–263) on three innovative approaches to tenure in Kenya, namely, community land trusts, shares in land-buying companies, and temporary occupation licences, by examining the degrees of security and property rights associated with them. It further explores the extent to which the different tenure forms have been applied more widely since the previous research, and the factors which may have facilitated or constrained this, such as changes in the broader policy, institutional and legislative framework. The paper concludes by giving pointers towards areas that warrant further investigation and longer-term monitoring.

Community and conservation land trusts as unlikely partners? The case of Troy Gardens, Madison, Wisconsin

Over the last two decades, private non-profit land trusts have gained increasing popularity among those who wish to conserve land or preserve access to affordable housing in the United States. Two types of land trusts—conservation trusts and community trusts—use many of the same tools, but for different purposes. Although both types of land trusts have collaborated with government agencies on a fairly regular basis, they have rarely worked with each other. In addition, questions have arisen concerning the appropriateness of private, non-profit land trusts engaging in de facto land-use planning. The Troy Gardens project, in Madison, Wisconsin, illustrates how two different private land trusts can successfully collaborate in land conservation and community-based development. In this project, the Madison Area Community Land Trust (MACLT), a community land trust, and the Urban Open Space Foundation (UOSF), a conservation land trust, have teamed together with several other organizations to preserve a 31-acre site in a city neighborhood for a combination of open space and affordable housing. This paper explores the strengths and challenges of the land trust collaboration, making suggestions for ways to increase the number of these types of collaborations in Wisconsin and around the United States.

The Community Land Trust: Preserving Affordable Housing Stock in Orange County, North Carolina

The Community Land Trust: Preserving Affordable Housing Stock in Orange County, North Carolina

Transformation Colliding: Students, Community, and Campus Connections

Transformation Colliding: Students, Community, and Campus Connections Wayne Meisel Introduction A friend of mine from Chicago retells the story about the first person she met in Kentucky . She introduced herself and said that she was a VISTA. "You're a visitor," the elderly woman replied. "No," my friend responded, worrying that the language barrier was going to be more difficult that she had thought. "No, I am a VISTA, Volunteers In Service To America!" "You're a visitor," the woman said once again. This exchange happened several more times until my friend actually realized that there was no language barrier at all. The elderly woman was indeed saying that she was a visitor. This incident was the first and perhaps the most important training she was to receive during her year-long stay in Kentucky. In her retelling of it and in her conveying its obvious personal impact, it had an impact on me. This region has a legacy of people coming to help. Some like my friend come and go, while others like Marie Cirillo from Woodlawn Community Land Trust and Danny Green from the David School have made their life here and never returned from whence they came. I, too, thought that I was headed down that path. When I retired from being a student activist, I hoped to move to Princeton, West Virginia, and work with Jerry Beasley, the president of Concord College. However, a funny thing happened. I ended up in Princeton all right, but rather than venturing to a new community I found myself returning to Princeton, New Jersey, the place of my childhood, to help launch the Bonner Foundation and eventually the Bonner Scholars Program. Part of me felt cheated. I wanted the VISTA-type experience for all the right and not-so-right reasons. But as I reflected on the words that the old woman shared with my friend, I got to thinking that these communities didn't need me to come down and work there for a year. Rather, the young people of those communities should have the opportunity to lead and serve in their own communities. When I discovered that Mr. Bonner wanted to give money for scholarships, the seed had already been planted to turn VISTA on its head, to create an 35 initiative that identified and supported youthful idealists from the very communities that people like me wanted to come down and help... for a year or two. And so with the help of Jerry Beasley, John Stephenson, the late president of Berea College, and David Sawyer, my great friend and the former director of Students for Appalachia, we designed and implemented the Bonner Scholars Program, an initiative that gave students from this region the recognition, the support and the challenge to be servant leaders in their own communities. By doing this, we hoped to demonstrate both at home and throughout the country that the young people of Appalachia were every bit as talented, committed and idealistic as any group of people in America. For when the idealism of young people is tapped and channeled, it offers talents, ideas, creativity, and impatience that are necessary to address and solve most problems today. Not that young people alone have the answers, but their participation and leadership are a critical piece and an essential ingredient for bringing about positive social change and building healthy communities. This premise is the foundation of the Bonner Scholars Program. There is more to it than that, but if you understand at least this part, you might gain a sense of the passion, the commitments, and the hopes for this program. The Bonner Foundation The Bonner Foundation currently supports 1,600 students attending college. Rather than try to identify these students ourselves and oversee their service activities, the foundation instead has created strong working partnerships with institutions of higher learning that have a common vision for supporting low income students, and a common commitment for being an active and telling presence in their communities. But the decision to partner with colleges was not for mere convenience alone. It was our hope and remains our conviction that, by having a high density of these students in a...

Homesteading in New York City, 1978-1993: The Divided Heart of Loisaida.

List of Plates and Figures Introduction Housing, Urban Homesteading, and Community Land Trusts in Historical and Theoretical Context Past and Present of the Lower East Side Sweat and Debris The Day the Wall Fell Down Conflicting Constructions of Work, Gender Roles, Ownership, and Community Social Movements, Community Organizations, and Private Lives Conclusion Sources Index