The Community Land Trust
Originally published in Loaves & Fishes, Clairvaux Farm, Elkton, MD.
In no country in the world is the love of property more active and more anxious than in the United States…
– Alexis de Tocqueville
The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with me.
— Leviticus 25:23
A number of cultures and civilizations older and less single¬minded than the Anglo⌐Saxon tradition recognize a proprietary relationship of human beings to the land, yet also ameliorate and establish limits to this expropriation, lessening its rapaciousness.
It is interesting just to ask the questions: Who are the ten biggest landowners in New Castle County, Delaware, or Cecil County, Maryland? And what percentage of the total land do they own? The answers to these questions would be more than just interesting.
PERPETUAL AFFORDABILITY
Primarily as a response to the need for more affordable housing, the concept of the community land trust ⌐⌐introduced in this country in the late sixties by the Institute for Community Economics (ICE) — has grown increasingly popular. The land trust is a non⌐profit corporation that acquires land and develops housing. The land trust sells the housing while leasing the land on which it sits, with the provision that when the housing is resold, its new price is limited by formula. Private investment (i.e., equity and improvements) is rewarded, but public investment (i.e., improvements in schools, streets, public facilities, and other homeowners’ properties) does not necessarily accrue to the individual. In this way, housing owned or developed by community land trusts is kept “affordable in perpetuity.”
PUBLIC– PRIVATE PROPERTY
But the deeper appeal of the land trust lies in its insistence upon the social dimension of the ownership of land which, as a commodity, is allowed to be treated as a strictly private entity, to be disposed of and to be enjoyed at the owner’s discretion. Environmental degradation, concentration of ownership in the hands of a powerful few, absentee ownership, speculation, and displacement due to disinvestment or reinvestment, are some of the consequences.
The land trust preserves the notion that an individual should be (1) secure in his or her ownership, (2) able to realize equity on his or her investment, and (3) capable of making the property a legacy to his or her heirs. And it adds to this notion the equally valid one that (1) community access, (2) socially produced equity, and (3) communal legacy are the public counterparts.
HOMELESSNESS AND LANDLESSNESS
Over a year ago I attended the Second National Community Land Trust Conference. It was an exhilarating and enlightening time. I visited the Lower East Side in New York City and was able to witness a community in the midst of vast disparities in its land use.
It was possible to stand on one street corner and see a city park where homeless people had taken up semi⌐permanent residence, an empty apartment building being “warehoused” by a large landlord who was waiting to sell it or develop it for upper⌐income professionals, another large apartment building being renovated and made into a condominium with units going for $2500 a month, and an apartment building being rehabilitated through sweat equity by the local RAIN Community Land Trust. The eventual mortgage payment on one of these units was to be about $350 a month.
Land reform movements, grassroots farm groups, and urban housing activists have all taken the land trust model to their hearts; and support for the implementation of land trusts is growing, with a virtual explosion in the number of trust incorporated in the 1980s. Vermont and Connecticut have loan and grant programs for land trust start⌐up, and Vermont recently appropriated $20 million to support land purchases by land trusts. Boston and New York have made agreements to turn over tax⌐defaulted property in low-income areas to land trusts.
Home is not just a roof but a place, not just walls but the community outside them, as well. Control of the land is fundamental to the preservation of homes for all. Drawing the connection between homelessness and landlessness, David Ostendorf, Director of Prairiefire Rural Action, addressed the Conference participants:
The displacement of people from the land, the loss of control of land and community, the concentration of wealth and power that we now face in this nation have been emerging over the centuries and really are a legacy that binds us, urban and rural, wherever we might be, and that in fact increasingly binds us in a global context with peoples’ movements across the world.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.