Struggles from below

In 2020, the conversation around racial equity has become more pronounced. Motivated by police violence in the US and the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, and so many others, thousands of people around the world have taken to the streets—despite a pandemic—to express their dismay not only at these deaths but more broadly at systemic racial inequity. 

In the US, it is no longer uncommon to hear people say that the country was built on stolen land  (from Native Americans) with stolen labour (from African slaves). While US history may be extreme in that regard, the UK and all colonising other countries have by definition benefitted from exploiting natural and human resources in other parts of the world and are now reckoning with that history.

Cities represent part of the long and grim history of discrimination and oppression against black people. They can also be part of the recovery from all that harm. Some cities’ work can be symbolically important, such as removing public monuments that honour oppression. But as professors of urban sustainability and community development at Arizona State University, we see that cities can do much more to address inequality, starting with an area that was key to past discrimination: how land is used.  

Inspired by Georgist thought, civil rights organisers in the 1960s recognised that denial of property rights was one of the key methods of reinforcing white supremacy in the US, blocking people from putting down roots in a community, limiting their political power as well as wealth.  Searching for an alternative approach, they borrowed from older ideas of common ownership and the stewardship of land for wider community benefit, taking inspiration from examples as far-flung as the Gramdan movement in India and the leased-land agricultural cooperatives in Israel. Their efforts resulted in creation of a new model for land ownership.  

Although associated primarily now with urban affordable housing efforts, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) began as a rural experiment to secure land rights for African-American farmers to work land for their own benefit. (This was in stark contrast to the sharecropping system prevalent after the Civil War, where black families would rent small plots of land, or shares, to work themselves and in return give a portion of their crop to the landowner at the end of the year.)

The first community land trust in rural Georgia in 1970 was established on land purchased by a small group of individuals with some federal grant assistance and became the largest single piece of land in the country owned by African Americans, who got to keep all the proceeds from their labour. Although the trust, New Communities Inc, was beset by drought and discrimination from the start and was forced to close by the late 1980s, it helped inspire people to create similar organisations across the country.

CLTs today

Community land trusts today are more often focused on housing. They are community-run, nonprofit landholding organisations that aim to help low-income buyers obtain homes. The CLT is a flexible civic tool for holding land on a democratic basis for the common good while facilitating private ownership of structures and improvements; it provides low-cost access to land held in a commons while enabling private ownership of the homes on that land. The tripartite structure of CLT Boards aims to include equal representation from CLT residents, members of the broader community, and public interest representatives (such as fair housing and/or environmental organisations).  

CLTs are a self-sustaining model that takes a one-time public investment to turn a home into permanently affordable housing based on shared equity. Trust land can be purchased or donated. The model allows community ownership of the land along with individual ownership of homes. The trust retains ownership of the land and maintains it for the benefit of homeowners present and future, and for the community as a whole. 

With this model, a buyer can get into a home for less money than elsewhere in the local market, because they aren’t paying for the land—just the building. This makes homes more affordable, especially for low-income families who often can get down-payment assistance and low-interest mortgages from the trust as well. And because the re-sale price is restricted, the home remains affordable for subsequent lower-income families who purchase it, sale after sale. The model balances wealth-building for families who would otherwise be unable to afford owning a home with preserving the community’s investment. In doing so, it maximises the impact of public dollars—which is especially critical when those dollars are so limited.  

The land lease sets out terms for any future sale of the property, letting the homeowner build equity through appreciation in value, while ensuring the home remains affordable for future limited-income buyers. This sort of shared-equity model may not appeal to people who can afford open-market housing. But for those otherwise priced out of the housing market, it is an opportunity to build equity and wealth, and establish credit and financial stability.

These trusts also serve renters by providing long-term leases with limits on rent prices, as well as by investing in housing in communities where others won’t. They also can give a more formal voice to tenants, who otherwise are often ignored by local officials.

There are now between 225 and 280 community land trusts in the US, which together have around 15,000 home ownership units and 20,000 rental units. To encourage more of this type of development, New York City passed a bill in 2017 exempting community land trusts from certain taxes. Houston in 2019 announced a plan to use a community land trust to develop 1,000 affordable units.

In the UK, there is a growing CLT movement that fits into a long history of community ownership and management of housing and assets—indeed, the original Garden Cities had a community trust that owned and managed land assets on behalf of the community. In the early 2000s, the CLT movement in the US served as an inspiration for a number of English academics and housing and community development professionals. A National CLT Demonstration programme supported a number of pilot projects, and in 2010 the UK National CLT Network was established to support the growing CLT movement and advocate on behalf of CLTs. There are currently 263 legally incorporated rural and urban Community Land Trusts in England and Wales, and dozens of new groups forming. Half of these groups formed in the last two years. Of these, some 935 CLT homes have been built to date and more than 16,000 community-led homes are in the pipeline. There are over 17,000 people registered as members of CLTs in the UK.  

CLTs in the UK are not a legal form like a company, but they are defined in law so they must be established to benefit a defined community, and they must be run as a not-for-private-profit.  Local people living and working in the community must have the opportunity to join the CLT as members, and those members control the CLT since the board is usually elected from the membership.

UK CLTs are active in both the least affordable and the most left-behind communities in the country. The trusts have been able to get planning permission and community support in sensitive locations where mainstream developers have failed, and they are pioneering new approaches to affordability, net-zero building, and modern methods of construction.  

The path ahead

So why have CLTs not grown faster? The primary obstacle is the lack of subsidy funds to write-down the initial costs of housing. That subsidy is needed to bridge the difference between the fair market value or construction/acquisition-rehab costs of a home and the sale price that is affordable to a lower-income family. In addition to stagnant or decreasing federal funding for US housing programmes, since the foreclosure crisis (the period of drastically elevated property seizures in the US housing market between 2007 and 2010) and the ensuing rise in rents across the country, many local governments have prioritised affordable rentals over owner-occupied homes with their federal dollars. As housing markets have heated up, the amount of subsidy needed to make homes affordable for purchase has grown, since income has not kept pace with escalating housing values.

Cities have also used municipal zoning powers to require larger developers to donate a portion of new development to community land trusts or related entities such as housing trust funds for permanently affordable housing.

In the UK, the National CLT Network and associated partners recently helped secure a £60 million per year Community Housing Fund from Homes England for community-led housing projects in the form of capital and revenue grants. Principal lenders to the sector have included the Ecology Building Society, Triodos Bank, Charity Bank, Unity Trust Bank, CAF Venturesome and Resonance. Confident that this market can deliver at scale with the right backing, the National CLT Network is calling for funding partners and lenders to help them mainstream community ownership of affordable housing and land.  

Partnerships between cities and community land trusts are a promising way to provide affordable housing and help low-income and minority families. As cities reflect on their roles in perpetuating institutional racism and what they can do to relieve it, they can use their zoning laws and negotiating power to support community land trusts as one way to keep housing affordable and benefit minority communities who have suffered for decades from unfair lending practices and discrimination.