Claim OwnershipOn Common Ground
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© 2020 Terra Nostra PRESS
Description
ON COMMON GROUND is a collection of original essays, written by 42 scholars and practitioners from a dozen countries, tracing the growth and diversification of the international community land trust movement.
A community land trust (CLT) is a transformative strategy of community-led development on community-owned land that has taken root in the Global North and is now spreading to the Global South. CLTs produce and preserve affordably priced homes, community gardens, retail spaces, and a variety of neighborhood facilities – all developed under the guidance of the people who live nearby; all managed to remain permanently affordable for people of modest means.
A community land trust (CLT) is a transformative strategy of community-led development on community-owned land that has taken root in the Global North and is now spreading to the Global South. CLTs produce and preserve affordably priced homes, community gardens, retail spaces, and a variety of neighborhood facilities – all developed under the guidance of the people who live nearby; all managed to remain permanently affordable for people of modest means.
21 Episodes
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1The book’s editors explain why they decided to produce On Common Ground, what it contains, and how they hope the book will be used. They acknowledge the variety of ways in which CLTs are being organized, operated, and applied throughout the world, while pointing to values and commitments that are shared by most CLT practitioners and scholars, including the 42 contributors to the present volume.
The global CLT landscape is one of enormous diversity, even in the United States where the “classic” CLT was conceived. Defining ownership, organizational, and operational features of this “classic” model are detailed in the present chapter, along with the most common variations in each. Five “causes of continuing variation” are considered as well.
Cabannes and Ross revisit the Garden City, originally proposed by Ebenezer Howard over 100 years ago, to ask how his vision might be delivered in a modern setting. Community land trusts, they argue, provide a partial answer, serving as “a vehicle for gradually assembling land and putting Garden City principles into practice – now not later.”
Arguments justifying CLTs tend to focus on their effectiveness in preserving affordability and preventing displacement in strong real estate markets where prices for land and housing are rising. Most justifications regularly overlook the multiple roles that CLTs can also play in improving conditions and empowering residents where real estate markets are weak. The executive director of the Oakland Community Land Trust in California endeavors to correct this rhetorical imbalance, making a case for the CLT’s counter-cyclical effectiveness in all markets, hot and cold.
How did an experimental “model” of community-led development on community-owned land grow from a single CLT prototype in 1969, seeded by African-American activists in a remote corner of the USA, to a national “movement” of over 280 CLTs today? The answer is to be found in five “growth factors”: message; champions; performance; policy; and hybrid vigor. Despite a steady rise in the number of CLTs and the size of their holdings, however, key features of the model and core values of the movement are precarious. The future may look different than the past.
Susannah Bunce and Joshua Barndt (read by Bob Rose)
The development of community land trusts in Canada occurred over a 40-year period in two distinct phases. The first generation of Canadian CLTs (1980 – 2012) either combined community-owned land with multi-unit housing cooperatives in Toronto and Montreal or promoted individual homeownership in western and central Canada. More recently, a second generation of CLTs has emerged in cities throughout the country in response to an escalating crisis in affordable housing, taking the form of either community-based or sector-based initiatives. Since 2017, older and newer CLTs have coalesced, via the Canadian Network of CLTs.
The authors are joined by five guests to map the trajectory of CLT development in England, covering three periods: “Origins of CLT thinking and practice” (1986 – 2008); “a decade of consolidation and growth” (2008-2018); and “potential futures for CLTs” (present and beyond). In the chapter’s conclusion, the question is asked and answered, “What are CLTs really about?”
Since the formation of the Brussels Community Land Trust in 2010, interest in the model has been steadily growing throughout Europe. The chapter takes stock of the current state of the European CLT movement, examining CLT developments in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and central and eastern Europe. Although the focus is on Europe, recent developments in Scotland and Ireland are included as well. The chapter concludes with a description of SHICC (Sustainable Housing for Inclusive and Cohesive Cities), a cross-national collaboration funded by the European Union to further CLT development.
Muchos activistas en América Latina y el Caribe consideran la propiedad colectiva de la tierra como un factor importante para la protección del territorio primigenio, para la promoción de la producción del hábitat, y para la consolidación de comunidades urbanas. Con excepción del Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña en San Juan, Puerto Rico, el modelo de los fideicomisos comunitarios de tierras aún no es muy conocido en la región. No obstante, ha habido modelos precursores y equivalentes modernos tales como los ejidos en México, los territorios comunales en Ecuador, y las estrategias para la recuperación de tierras de pueblos indígenas en Bolivia, Brasil, y varios países en el Caribe. En las áreas urbanas, la titularidad cooperativa de la tierra y las viviendas, y la administración cooperativa de reservas extraídas del mercado y bajo el dominio municipal pueden encontrarse en organizaciones como las Cooperativas de Vivienda por Ayuda Mutua en Uruguay, y en varias luchas e iniciativas en Argentina, Brasil, y Venezuela.
El Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña en San Juan, Puerto Rico, ganador del Premio Mundial del Habitat de las Naciones Unidas en 2016, se ha convertido en una inspiración para activistas comunitarios en países del sur global que buscan una forma nueva de regularizar la tenencia de la tierra y de asegurar viviendas para residentes en asentamientos informales. Este capítulo examina los orígenes y la estructura organizacional de este fideicomiso comunitario de tierras y su potencial para una aplicación más amplia en otros países.
Susan Alancraig is a photographer, librarian and gardener. She has lived in Honduras, was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Uganda, has been on the board of Honduras Community Support Corporation since its inception – and she loves reading aloud!
The rallying cry of a campaign launched by the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in 1989, “Take a Stand, Own the Land” was aimed at forcing the transfer of 30 acres of blighted, vacant land into the hands of a CLT subsidiary created the year before. Half was owned by the City of Boston and half by private individuals or corporations. The success of this grassroots campaign is the centerpiece of the story told by Hernandez and Smith in describing DSNI’s efforts to construct permanently affordable housing, to build an urban village, and to create a city-wide network of new CLTs in Boston.
Community land trusts preserve affordability and protect security of tenure for homeowners and renters, but CLTs are not only about housing. They are also being used to meet the challenge of providing and protecting land for urban agriculture. Ela and Rosenberg cite leading examples in the United States, while offering guidance on “eight strategic questions” that urban farmers should consider when seeking long-term access to land. They also discuss roles that a “central server” might play in securing agricultural land and providing services for individual growers and neighborhood organizations throughout a metropolitan area.
In 1984, the administration of Mayor Bernie Sanders helped to create the Burlington Community Land Trust, the first municipally initiated and municipally supported CLT in the United States. Now known as the Champlain Housing Trust (CHT), it has grown into the country’s largest CLT with a real estate portfolio of over 3000 units of permanently affordable housing and over 160,000 square feet of nonresidential space, scattered across a three-county service area. CHT’s story is told by its founding president, Brenda Torpy, who later became the organization’s longest-serving executive director.
Established in 2003 with a service area encompassing an entire metropolitan area, the Urban Land Conservancy has become a major player on Denver’s real estate scene. An integral part of its success comes from the organization’s adoption of key features of the CLT, including permanent ownership of land, long-term ground leasing, and permanent affordability of housing and other buildings located on its land. More than most CLTs in the USA and elsewhere, ULC has taken advantage of the model’s versatility to move beyond homeownership –and beyond housing. ULC has supported the development of over 1000 units of multi-family rental housing, while also helping to develop 700,000 square feet of non-residential space for nonprofit partners. It has recently incubated the Elevation CLT, a new organization that (unlike ULC) will focus on the development and stewardship of resale-restricted owner-occupied housing.
The founding executive director of the largest CLT in the United Kingdom traces the process and politics behind the establishment of the London Community Land Trust. At the center of this story is a 10-year campaign that was waged by LCLT to acquire and to convert a former NHS hospital into affordable housing. Drawing on this experience, which was ultimately a success, he offers three lessons that are “relevant to the CLT movement worldwide.”
In 2013, the first community land trust in Europe was established by grassroots housing activists in Brussels with financial support from their regional government. Geert De Pauw, an organizer and coordinator of the Brussels CLT, and Nele Aernouts, a researcher and teacher at the Vrije Universiteit, describe the process of starting this urban CLT and completing its early projects. Discussed, too, are the CLT’s prospects and plans for future growth.
The African-American activists who created the modern CLT intended it to be a platform for increasing the prosperity and power of people of color. Progress has been made, but more remains to be done. This is an historic moment in the march toward racial justice, argues the executive director of the Grounded Solutions Network, requiring self-examination among CLTs in the United States – and elsewhere. CLTs must do a better job, in particular, of going to scale and of making room for the next generation of CLT experts and leaders who must be “collectively diverse and intentionally representative of the communities they serve.”
Over the last fifty years, bioethics has become one of the most highly developed fields in the study of applied ethics. María E. Hernández-Torrales applies the general principles of bioethical analysis to make the case for a right to housing. She then applies the same principles to argue that the CLT is an “ethical model” insofar as it secures safe decent, and affordable housing for individuals, even as it takes into consideration the environmental, cultural, and social needs of the larger community.
As the CLT model has grown and proliferated in the United States, it has strayed from its original purpose, according to Olivia Williams. Instead of being a mechanism for collective decision-making and long-term control by poor, working class, and marginalized people over the development of land, the model is increasingly perceived and promoted primarily as an economically efficient strategy for producing affordable housing. How did this happen? And what can now be done to return CLTs to being a movement for community control of land and housing, one that is accountable to “those on the frontlines of grassroots struggles”?
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