W(h)ither the community in community land trusts?

ABSTRACT

Community land trusts (CLTs) began as a model for community control over land in the late 1960s. The model allows for individual ownership of improvements to land while the land is owned by the CLT. This effectively removes the land from the speculative market and allows for less marketable uses that might benefit disadvantaged communities. As the CLT model has grown and proliferated, it has evolved over time to become primarily a means to provide affordable housing, with a corresponding reduced emphasis on community control. This article explores the history of the CLT movement, provides evidence of the loss of community in CLTs, and discusses why this loss of community from CLTs is important to the potential of the CLT model.

Notes

1. Greg Rosenberg was the long-time executive director of the Madison Area Community Land Trust, a former Director of the National CLT Network’s Academy, and a long-time consultant. For this reference, see Rosenberg (2013).

2. Community is a very loaded term, but its ambiguity is part of the reason it was intentionally included in the name of the CLT organizational model (see Swann et al., 1972). Our point is not to engage in a definitional argument, but our working definition of community for the purposes of this article is a dense set of social relations embedded within a place (for a lengthy discussion of the meanings of community, see Lyon & Driskell, 2011).

3. Adding to the complexity previously mentioned, some CLTs are in fact managed by cities, states, or other public entities.

4. We recognize that this broad account from Piven and Cloward (1979) has been challenged by social movement scholars (see, for instance, Barker, 2001, or, for a history of urban social movements that differs from Piven & Cloward, 1979, but does not directly critique them, see Fisher, 1994). We do not have the space here to engage in that debate here. But given the trajectory of the field of community development and the emergent parallels in the history of CLTs, we find Piven and Cloward’s (1979) account useful.

5. There is not the space here to explain all of the different land reform movements. See Davis (2010b) for a deeper exploration of these various movements and their relationship to community land trusts or Geisler and Daneker (2000) for a more general discussion of property and land reform efforts.

6. In this section, we rely heavily on Davis’s excellent history of CLTs (Davis, 2010b).

7. As detailed in the 1982 Community Land Trust Handbook, the first urban CLT was attempted in Washington, DC, and though it was short-lived, many of the lessons learned in DC were applied in Cincinnati (Institute for Community Economics, 1982).

8. They notably begin their article with the statement: “The primary focus of community land trusts (CLTs) is affordable housing for individuals and communities” (Gray & Galande, 2011, p. 241)—which itself is an indication of how the thinking about CLTs has evolved.

9. For a more thorough discussion of mission statements and other ways in which CLTs shape themselves, see Stromberg (2016).

10. These interview quotes are from two different research projects the researchers have been engaged in with CLTs.

11. The 2015 report of survey results does not distinguish between CLTs and other member nonprofits in its discussion of service areas (Thaden & Webb, 2015), but Grounded Solutions Network provided the authors with the raw data from the survey results to support our analysis.

12. Krinsky and Hovde (1996) have already made the argument that CLT expansion can make organizing CLT residents for political ends more difficult. Beyond organizing, we suggest that geographic growth makes any form of community building difficult to implement.

13. We recognize that involvement is in no way the equivalent of control, but it is a bare minimum requirement for control to even be possible.

14. Full disclosure: Author Brian Stromberg is a member of the board of directors of the ECLT.

15. The emphasis on scalar growth strategies has become prominent in the larger field of community economics, as many types of organizations are facing similar pressure to “go to scale” (Casper-Futterman, 2016).

16. In 2006, the Ford Foundation funded a large report on SEH by John Davis that detailed the three major SEH models (Davis, 2006). Since then, their promotion of SEH has grown immensely.

17. PAH was first promoted by Thaden (2013) and then taken up as the term of industry by the National CLT Network and the Grounded Solutions Network.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James DeFilippis

James DeFilippis is a Professor of Urban Planning at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. He has a PhD in Geography from Rutgers. He is the author or editor of six books and has written more than 50 journal articles, book chapters, and policy reports on issues of community development, community organizing, urban politics and policy, affordable housing, labor, and immigration.

Brian Stromberg

Brian Stromberg received his PhD in Planning and Public Policy from the Edward J. Bloustein School at Rutgers University in 2016. He is currently working as a Social Science Analyst in the Office of Policy Development and Research in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. His dissertation research explored how community land trusts engage with their heritage as alternative forms of property relationships.

Olivia R. Williams

Olivia R. Williams earned her PhD in Geography in 2017 from Florida State University and is currently a faculty member at Augustana College in Environmental Studies. As a scholar of alternative economies, her research evaluates the implications of different models for collectively sharing resources, such as cooperatives, local exchange trading systems, community supported agriculture, or the topic of her current research: community land trusts. She utilizes qualitative, participatory, and activist co-research methods and has contributed to the literature in urban studies, critical geography, and research praxis with articles published in Area, Geoforum, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, and Urban Geography.