Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Real Estate for Radicals project features case study-based research on affordable community-owned housing (co-ops, community land trusts, communes, and squats) and their potential to advance housing as a human right.
As climate change makes disasters like hurricanes, floods, and wildfires become more frequent, severe, and expensive, residents and policymakers are increasingly turning toward community land trusts (CLTs)—nonprofits that buy land to ensure community control, stave off displacement, and ensure long-term affordability.
Besides embracing cooperatives and community land trusts, Jubilee Justice is dedicated to an open-source, climate-friendly type of rice farming and to courageous “transformational learning journeys” for racial healing.
The sociological relevance of a C.L.T. is in developing a community orientation for living a life aligned with autonomous Degrowth and the promotion of New Local Post-Capitalism.
The Wiyot Tribe and Cooperation Humboldt are working together to form a type of Community Land Trust (CLT), Dishgamu Humboldt, the first of its kind, to structurally ensure that the Wiyot tribe will maintain decision-making power in this land trust, forever.
Borsodi envisioned his School as a local, self-governing organization to provide the basic knowledge and skills for a livable world and the good life.
Now the question, in New York and elsewhere, is whether this growing call for community-controlled development can overcome the still widespread belief that the private sector does things best.
I will say, as I think Pen stresses in the solidarity economy sort of writings and discussions, that we do need a new economic context for this. These aren’t all going to be your traditional profitable businesses. They contribute a lot more to the community.
Acquiring more land for CLTs dedicated to African-American cultural use would be a great way to address a colossal historic wrong.
The Woodland Community Land Trust was incorporated in 1979, making it one of the oldest Community Land Trusts (CLTs) established in the United States. Located in the Clearfork Valley of northeastern Tennessee, a low-income Appalachian community dominated by extractive industry and concentrated land holding, economic, and political power, Woodland recently marked its 40th year in operation.
Members of Earthseed describe themselves as a group of “black and brown parents, activists, artists, educators, business owners, farmers, and researchers, who came together to remember our relationships to land, to livelihood and to each other,” and to cultivate a “transformational response to oppression and collective heartbreak: A model of community resilience through cooperative ownership of land and resources.”
This autumn, builders will start work on Oakfield Road in Anfield. Many houses in this part of Liverpool have remained empty since the government’s failed ‘housing market renewal’ policy shipped people out, then stalled in 2008. Seven years ago, a group of residents formed a community land trust to bring nine terraces on Oakfield Road into community ownership. Now, instead of being demolished, they have been reimagined as cosy, energy-efficient homes, with space for local businesses, winter gardens, a market and a cafe.
