On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust

By Terra Nostra Press

Fifty years ago, African-American activists in Albany, Georgia extended their political fight for civil rights into the economic realm by creating New Communities Inc. They had come to believe that owning land was essential to securing greater independence for their people. But landownership was out-of-reach for most African-Americans in the Dee

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terra Nostra Press
• Release date: Jul 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734403015

Book preview

Introduction

On Common Ground

John Emmeus Davis, Line Algoed,

and María E. Hernández-Torrales

Fifty years after the appearance of the first community land trust (CLT) in the United States, an invention forged in the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement, CLTs have multiplied. In its country of origin, over 260 CLTs are operating in cities, suburbs, islands, and towns. Nearly every state has at least one, as does the District of Columbia. Beyond the United States, over 300 CLTs are up and running in the United Kingdom. Others have been established in Australia, Belgium, Canada, and France. Interest has been rising in Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, and Spain.

To date, most of the growth in what is becoming a worldwide CLT movement has occurred in the Global North. But that is changing, due in part to the example and impact of the Caño Martín Peña CLT in Puerto Rico. This community-led initiative for regularizing tenure and for securing the homes of families residing in informal settlements has made steady progress despite natural disasters and the island’s ongoing economic distress, attracting the attention of people living in similar situations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Community activists in Africa and South Asia have taken note of the CLT as well, exploring whether some version of this strategy might be used to promote equitable and sustainable development in rural and urban areas within their own countries.

Community land trusts have been noticed too by the United Nations. At the 2016 Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development in Quito, Ecuador, community land trusts were included among the policies, tools, mechanisms, and financing models named in the UN’s New Urban Agenda for promoting access to housing and making cities more inclusive. CLTs were touted as one of several cooperative solutions for addressing, in the Agenda's words, the evolving needs of persons and communities, in order to improve the supply of housing, especially for low-income groups, prevent segregation, and [prevent] arbitrary forced evictions and displacements . . . with special attention to programmes for upgrading slums and informal settlements. CLTs acquire, manage, and develop land for a variety of purposes, but most of them do have a programmatic focus on promoting and preserving access to housing, especially for low-income groups. Many CLTs pay special attention, moreover, to addressing the needs of people at risk of being displaced, either because they are residing on lands for which they do not hold formal title or because they are being priced out of areas where land values and housing costs are rapidly rising.

This puts the emerging CLT movement at the intersection of two world-wide movements for social change. The first is occurring in places where people who are land-insecure are struggling to gain recognition, registration, and legal protection for collective property, acreage that is occupied under some form of informal landholding system. Depending on the country, such property is termed communal, collective, customary, native, indigenous, or community land. Secondly, CLTs are part of an increasingly powerful housing rights movement that is surfacing in cities around the world. The issues being championed by this amorphous movement include a right to the city, rent control, community-led development, and housing that remains permanently affordable.

Rising international interest in the community land trust, spurred in part by the alignment of CLTs with these other global movements, is what prompted us to produce the present volume. Our purpose in commissioning the original essays contained herein was four-fold. We wanted to fill a gap in current research which has largely overlooked the appearance of a world-wide CLT movement and the existence of cross-national connections and influences. We wanted to raise the profile of exemplary CLTs having particular relevance for equitable development in communities facing similar challenges, including those in which most residents are living without security of tenure. We wanted to provoke greater peer-to-peer learning across national borders, fostering the spread of innovative strategies and best practices. Finally, as unapologetic advocates for this particular approach to community-led development on community-owned land, we wanted to spur the formation of new CLTs in communities and countries that are currently without one. By sharing the stories of practitioners and projects in places where CLTs have had success in providing homes (and other community assets) that remain permanently affordable, we hope to encourage community organizers, public officials, and nongovernmental organizations to give the CLT a try.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Community land trusts are not all alike. Among the hundreds of CLTs that already exist or are presently being planned, there are numerous variations in how these organizations are structured, how their lands are utilized, how development is done, and how the stewardship of housing is operationalized. What is called a community land trust can vary greatly from one country to another, even from one community to another within the same country.

The basic features of the modern-day CLT were originally outlined in a popular book published in 1972. The design for this new model for land tenure in America was drawn mostly from New Communities Inc., a rural settlement founded three years earlier by African-American activists who sought to combine community ownership of land, individual ownership of multi-family and single-family housing, and the cooperative organization of agricultural production. The book’s authors drew, too, on a number of historical precedents, including the collectively owned lands of indigenous peoples, the town commons of colonial New England, the moshav ovdim of Israel, the ejidos of Mexico, the Ujamaa Vijijini of Tanzania, and the Gramdan villages of India.

The model described in 1972 also bore a close resemblance to the mixed-ownership scheme that Ebenezer Howard had proposed in 1898 for the Garden Cities of England. The houses, stores, orchards, and factories in the new towns he wanted to establish on the outskirts of major cities would be privately owned by individuals, cooperatives, or for-profit businesses, but the underlying land would be owned forever by a nongovernmental organization, created expressly for that purpose. These scattered parcels of land, despite their removal from the speculative market, would be made available for planned development and productive use through long-term ground leases, executed between the non-profit landowner and myriad individuals who owned buildings or operated enterprises on the leaseholds. Land was to be held and managed on behalf of all residents — rich and poor, present and future — enabling a community to direct its own development, to determine its own fate, and to capture for the common good a majority of the gains in land value that society as a whole had helped to create.

To the mixed-ownership model pioneered in England, India, and elsewhere, the visionaries who created New Communities, Inc. — and the reflective practitioners who followed in their wake — added organizational and operational features of their own, turning the model into something different, something new. Community-owned land remained the foundation on which a CLT was to be established, with a private, nonprofit corporation holding and managing scattered parcels of land for the benefit of residents of a particular locale, especially low-income families in need of housing. What got added were mechanisms for ensuring that the development done by a CLT would be guided by the community, as would the organization itself. This was not development from above, dictated by a governmental body, a charitable investor, or a benevolent provider of social housing. It was development from below, directed by residents of the community a CLT had been organized to serve. Ownership and empowerment were to go hand-in-hand. Added, too, was an operational commitment to the stewardship of any lands entrusted to the CLT and of any buildings erected on its lands, most of which would be owned by somebody else. Projects pursued by a CLT were designed to ensure that housing, nonresidential buildings, and other land uses would remain continuously affordable, long after development was done.

These distinctive features of ownership, organization, and operation, overlapping and interacting in a dynamic model of place-based development, became known as the classic CLT.

Almost as soon as nearly everyone came to agree on this particular conception and configuration of the community land trust, however, the model began to be modified in countless ways. Variations arose in every feature of the classic CLT as practitioners in different places adapted it to fit conditions, needs, and priorities in their own communities or to fit customs and laws in their own countries.

This continuing process of innovation and adaptation has helped the CLT to spread across a disparate international landscape and to thrive in a range of settings. At the same time, the diversity of meanings attached to the model and the variety of ways in which CLTs are structured have introduced a degree of difficulty to the task of explaining exactly what a CLT might be. Today, there is ambiguity—even a dose of controversy—to be found in the description and implementation of every component.

Community. Throughout the world, most organizations that call themselves a CLT are committed to involving a place-based population in their activities, incorporating a participatory ethos into their organization’s purposes, practices, and structure. People who live on the CLT’s lands and those who live nearby are encouraged to become voting members of the organization. They are recruited to serve on its governing board.¹ They are invited to participate in shaping the uses and projects proposed by the CLT. Development is community-led, along with the organization that initiates and oversees that development.

Ambiguity enters the picture because of the varying arrangements that CLTs employ in striving to engage and to empower their community. Controversy arises because some CLTs have dispensed with community altogether, causing critics to question whether they should even be considered a real CLT. The traditional model’s distinctive features of ownership and operation might be present, but residents who are served by the organization neither govern nor guide it; that is, community is missing from the make-up of the entity doing development. Variations like these create perennial challenges for CLT advocates whenever they try to reach a consensus as to what deserves to be deemed a community land trust.²

Land. The typical CLT is a nonprofit organization that removes land permanently from the marketplace, managing it on behalf of a place-based community while making it available for long-term use by individuals and organizations. Title to the buildings on a CLTs land, either those existing when the CLT acquired the land or those constructed later on, is held individually by any number of parties — homeowners, cooperatives, businesses, gardeners, farmers, etc. The underlying land is leased from the CLT by the buildings’ owners.

This mixed-ownership arrangement blurs the legal and conceptual boundary between conventional categories of tenure, where real property is presumed to be one thing or the other. A community land trust messes up this tidy picture, for it is balanced half-way between the two extremes of individual property, owned and operated primarily for the purpose of promoting private interests; and collective property, owned and operated to promote a common interest. The CLT tilts toward the former in its treatment of buildings. It tilts toward the latter in its treatment of land, making the CLT a first cousin to cooperatives, co-housing, and various forms of communal, collective, and tribal land.

Although a CLT’s lands are frequently and fairly characterized as community-owned or, in the parlance of the present volume, as common ground, these landholdings are neither collectively nor cooperatively owned by the people living on them or around them. Title is held exclusively by the CLT. A community land trust is ownership for the common good, not ownership in common.³

There are places, however, where the separation of ownership is made difficult (or impossible) by quirks in the property laws of a particular country or by the quibbles of prospective funders.⁴ CLTs have sometimes been compelled, therefore, to retain ownership of buildings as well as the land or to relinquish ownership of both, while imposing long-lasting restrictions on the use and affordability of these properties. Another variation has been developed in Puerto Rico, where the Caño Martín Peña CLT holds the underlying land but uses a durable surface rights deed, rather than a ground lease, to provide security of tenure for people who own and occupy houses on the CLT’s land. Some of them are living on sites their families have occupied for nearly a hundred years.

Trust. Although trust is part of their given name, CLTs have rarely been established as real estate trusts.⁵ Most are NGOs — private, nonprofit corporations with a charitable purpose of meeting the needs of populations who are regularly underserved by both the market and the state. Trust refers not to how a CLT is organized, but to how it is operated. Trust is what a CLT does in overseeing the lands and buildings under its care and in performing the duties of stewardship. Foremost among these duties is the preservation of affordability, ensuring long-term access to land and housing for people of modest means and preventing their displacement due to gentrification and other pressures. Stewardship also includes such responsibilities as preventing deferred maintenance in housing and other buildings on the CLT’s land and intervening, if necessary, to protect occupants against predatory lending, arbitrary eviction, mortgage foreclosure, and other threats to security of tenure.

Some CLTs are focused less on the provision of housing, however, than on the preservation of watersheds, woodlands, or agricultural lands, either in rural or urban areas. The stewardship responsibilities of a CLT entrusted with managing such lands can look very different than the stewardship needed when affordable housing is a CLT’s operational focus.

Model. In 1972, the first book to describe the community land trust called it a new model of land tenure. It has been called a model ever since. A number of practitioners and researchers have grown uncomfortable with the term, however. Some object because model, from their perspective, carries a negative connotation of something experimental, unfinished, unreliable. They point to fifty years of success, saying that the CLT is no longer a working prototype, but a road-tested, high-performing vehicle that has gone the distance and proven its effectiveness under challenging conditions.

Others object because model seems to imply there is only one proper way of structuring a CLT, when the reality unfolding around the world is the emergence of many structures and strategies. Each country and community is composing its own variation on the theme of CLT classic. Model tends to be especially problematic for organizers in the Global South, for whom the term is tainted with a whiff of Yankee arrogance, as if there exists some sort of universal blueprint for building a CLT, indelibly stamped with Made in America. Most organizers outside of the Global North tend to avoid the term, therefore, preferring to describe the CLT as a mechanism, instrument, or tool.

On the other hand, there are still many practitioners and researchers for whom model remains their term of choice. It holds for them a positive, prescriptive message of a design, pattern, or practice that is exemplary and worthy of consideration by anyone involved with affordable housing or community development. They are unconcerned that model may also suggest that the CLT is still being fine-tuned, still in a state of flux. After all, a restless search for better ways of configuring and combining ownership, organization, and operation is part of the reason why CLTs have been able to thrive in so many political and economic environments, some of which were initially hostile to their germination.

A majority of our book’s contributors have in fact continued the custom of referring to the CLT as a model, but we have not discouraged contributors who have preferred to call it something else. Even authors who regularly refer to the CLT as a model also describe it, on occasion, as a strategy, platform, mechanism, vehicle, construct, or tool — sometimes within the same essay. These terms are used interchangeably throughout the book.

WHAT’S IN THE BOOK?

The volume is divided into five sections, each containing a collection of chapters addressing a similar topic:

I. Bright Ideas: five essays provide an overview of strategies, structures, definitions, and justifications for doing community-led development on community-owned land, surveying the diverse landscape of the community land trust.

II. National Networks: the proliferation of CLTs in the Global North is examined in four essays focused on the development of robust CLT movements in the United States, England, Canada, and Europe.

III. Regional Seedbeds: six essays explore the potential for future CLT growth in the Global South, viewed through the lens of a seminal CLT in Puerto Rico and other noteworthy initiatives in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

IV. Urban Applications: case studies of CLTs in London, in Brussels, and in three cities in the United States — Boston, Burlington, and Denver — demonstrate the model’s success in providing affordable housing, promoting commercial development, and spurring neighborhood revitalization. Another essay is devoted to the acquisition and stewardship of land for urban agriculture, showing that CLTs are not only about housing.

V. Critical Perspectives: a handful of shorter essays reflect on the changing environment to which CLTs must adapt in the years ahead and the emerging opportunities for CLTs to go to scale. Several contributors call attention to the need for CLT practitioners to make their organizations more inclusive and responsive to the communities they serve if CLTs are to succeed in reclaiming the commons and transforming property and power in the place of residence.

Production of this book was made possible by the Center for CLT Innovation and by the generous financial support of World Habitat, the Urban Land Conservancy, Solidus Inc., and Sustainable Housing for Inclusive and Cohesive Cities, a cross-national initiative funded by the European Union. Translation and production of the Spanish edition was made possible by a substantial grant from the Ford Foundation, arranged by Jerry Maldonado. Artwork was donated by Bonnie Acker. The book was designed by Sara DeHaan.

We must also express our gratitude, of course, for the forty-two authors from a dozen different countries who donated their time and talents to this project. When recruiting this remarkable parliament of scholars and practitioners, we recognized that perspectives on the CLT were bound to differ. As an initial prompt, we proposed a working definition of the CLT: community-led development of permanently affordable housing on community-owned land. But we anticipated — correctly, as it turned out — that some authors would choose to shrink the boundaries of that broad definition, while others would want to expand it. We welcomed both. We tried to respect, as well, the distinctive voices that contributors brought to the task of reporting their findings and telling their stories. Some chapters are conventionally academic in style, therefore, while others are more anecdotal, written by practitioners talking candidly about their personal experience in working with CLTs in their own communities.

Although neither conceptual nor stylistic uniformity is to be found in the current collection of essays, there are commonalities nonetheless. What unites a global community of CLT practitioners and scholars is more important than what separates us. Woven throughout the book’s twenty-six chapters are recurring themes that provide something of a lingua franca for understanding what it means for an organization to be a CLT and to behave like one. There is a shared commitment to reinventing and repurposing real estate for the common good. There is a shared conviction that community-owned land, in particular, is likely to do a better job of promoting equitable and sustainable development than land that is commodified and owned individually, especially in places populated by groups that have long been disadvantaged and disempowered.

Another trait that is shared by most CLT scholars and practitioners, another theme that is threaded through the present volume, is a conviction that the whole of a CLT is greater than the sum of its parts. Across the diverse landscape of CLTs, ownership, organization, and operation are not configured exactly the same in every town and country. Wherever this strategy has been adopted, however, there is a general recognition that it takes more than a single component to make a CLT; it takes more than the reinvention of any one of them to bend the arc of development toward a fairer distribution of property and power. Community-owned land, by itself, is not enough. Community-led development is not enough. Permanently affordable housing is not enough. It is their combination that gives a CLT its distinctive identity and transformative potential.⁶

To be sure, there are places in the world where CLTs have been effective without adopting every feature of the classic CLT. That model is no longer a template, but it remains a touchstone. It is where most people start, when striving to adapt this complex form of tenure to their own situations. It is where most people hope a CLT will lead, when envisioning a better outcome from their arduous, virtuous labors, whether providing affordable housing, rebuilding residential neighborhoods, regularizing tenure in informal settlements, or preserving productive lands and local enterprises at risk of being lost to market pressures.

When land is owned for the common good of a place-based community, present and future; when development is done by an organization that is a creature of that community, rooted in it, accountable to it, and guided by it; when stewardship is deliberate, diligent, and durable . . . justice is more likely to be achieved. And more likely to last. That is the moral impetus and lofty promise of common ground.

Notes

1.Organizationally, the model promoted by the Institute for Community Economics during the 1980s had an open membership and a three-part board, representing the interests of the people who live on the CLT’s land, people who live within the CLT’s service area, and institutions that serve that geography, including government, churches, banks, businesses, and other NGOs. See Institute for Community Economics, The Community Land Trust Handbook (Rodale Press, 1982).

2.To a certain degree, we have sidestepped this definitional debate in the present volume by featuring a number of organizations that self-identify as a community land trust, even if they do not exhibit every feature of what is known in the USA as the classic CLT. Our ecumenical embrace had limits, however. We admitted to the company of CLTs only organizations that are committed to removing land permanently from the stream of commerce, placing it under the ownership or control of a designated community and stewarding that land for the common good.

3.This echoes the earliest description of the CLT (International Independence Institute, The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America, Cambridge MA: Center for Community Economic Development, 1972: 1): The community land trust is not primarily concerned with common ownership. Rather, its concern is ownership for the common good, which may or may not be combined with common ownership. Although the people living on a CLT’s land do not hold title to the underlying land, the resale formula used by some CLTs does provide for a modest increase in the homeowner’s equity if the land has appreciated in value during the homeowner’s tenure.

4.North Carolina and Ohio are two examples of states in the USA where laws have posed difficulties for the separation of ownership. CLTs in England and Australia have faced a similar hurdle, requiring them to find legal work-arounds.

5.Trusts are established by individuals to control the distribution of their property, either during the individuals’ lifetimes or after death. Property is often real estate, but it can also be stocks, bonds, or other assets. The person who creates the trust is the settlor. The person who manages the property on another’s behalf is the trustee. The latter takes title to the property (although, under a revocable trust, the settlor may later reclaim ownership). Proceeds from the trust are distributed by the trustee to a list of beneficiaries named by the settlor when the trust was created. This is definitely not how the typical CLT is established, structured, or operated.

6.The synergy that comes from combining the components of a CLT is explored in greater detail in Chapter 26 of the present volume: Better Together: The Challenging, Transformative Complexity of Community, Land, and Trust.

PART ONE

BRIGHT IDEAS

Surveying the Diverse Landscape of Common Ground: Structures, Strategies, and Justifications

1.

In Land We Trust

Key Features and Common Variations

of Community Land Trusts in the USA

John Emmeus Davis

The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America was published in 1972. It was written by Robert Swann, Shimon Gottschalk, Erick Hansch, and Edward Webster of the International Independence Institute, a nonprofit organization founded five years earlier by Ralph Borsodi. The successor to that organization, the Institute for Community Economics, published The Community Land Trust Handbook in 1982, adding organizational and operational refinements to the model that Swann and his colleagues had introduced a decade before.

These two books provided the conceptual framework for what eventually became known in the United States as the classic CLT. Years later, this framework was given solidity and durability when a federal definition of the community land trust was inserted into the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 by then-Congressman Bernie Sanders.

By the start of the New Millennium, therefore, a standard definition of the CLT had gained wide currency among community activists and public officials. There could be found in most community land trusts in the United States the same features of organization, ownership, and operation that characterized the classic CLT. But that was not true in every case. As practitioners adapted the model to fit the preferences, politics, and needs of their own communities, they modified some features of the classic CLT, while retaining others. This has created a CLT landscape of enormous diversity.¹

I. ORGANIZATION: HOW IS A CLT STRUCTURED?

Nonprofit, Charitable Corporation

CLT classic: Organizationally, a community land trust is a private, not-for-profit corporation that is chartered under the laws of the state in which it is located. (Legally, a CLT is not a trust, but an entity that is called in many other countries an NGO: a nongovernmental organization.) Most CLTs in the United States target their activities and resources toward charitable activities like providing housing for low-income people, combating neighborhood deterioration, or what federal law describes as lessening the burdens of government. Most CLTs qualify, accordingly, for a charitable designation from the U.S. government that exempts them from paying federal income taxes and that gives private citizens a tax deduction when donating money or property to a CLT.²

CLT variations: Although most CLTs are autonomous organizations created from scratch, some have been established as a corporate subsidiary or internal program of an older nonprofit organization. In a few cases, a local government or a municipal corporation like a redevelopment authority or a public housing authority has developed resale-restricted, owner-occupied housing on leased land, administering a program that resembles a CLT.

When a new CLT is established within the corporate shell of a pre-existing organization, the CLT usually becomes a permanent part of that organization’s on-going operations. This arrangement can be temporary, however, with the CLT eventually spun off as a separate entity when it has the capacity, constituency, and funding to thrive by itself. Another variation has occurred among a handful of CLTs that have chosen not to seek a tax exemption from the federal government in order to serve households earning more than the median or to pursue other activities that do not qualify as charitable.

Place-Based Membership

CLT classic: The CLT operates within the physical, geographic boundaries of a targeted locale. It is guided by—and accountable to — the people who call that locality their home. Any adult who resides on the CLT’s land and any adult who resides within its geographically defined community is eligible to become a voting member of the CLT. The duties and powers granted to this corporate membership are spelled out in the organization’s bylaws. Members typically nominate and elect a majority of the governing board. Members also approve proposed amendments to the bylaws, including any changes to the resale formula setting the future price of CLT homes.

CLT variations: Most CLTs are membership organizations, drawing their members from a community that is geographically defined. Within the diverse world of CLTs, however, there is considerable variation in the size of that community. Two decades ago, the area served by most CLTs was a single inner-city neighborhood or a small rural town. That has changed. Many CLTs formed in more recent years have staked out a wider service area, encompassing multiple neighborhoods, an entire city, an entire county, or, in a few cases, a multi-county region.

There are also many variations in the composition of a CLT’s membership. Some CLT’s have opened their membership to individuals who reside outside of the CLT’s target area. Other CLT’s have expanded their membership beyond individuals to allow non-profit corporations, local governments, or private institutions like hospitals, churches, or businesses to become voting members of the CLT. There are also some CLTs without a membership and a few where the entire board is appointed by a municipal government, by a community foundation, or by some other corporate sponsor.

Tripartite Governance

CLT classic: The board of directors of the classic CLT is composed of three parts, each containing an equal number of seats. One third of the board represents the interests of people who lease land from the CLT (leaseholder representatives). One third of the board represents the interests of residents from the surrounding community who neither lease land from the CLT nor live in CLT housing (general representatives). One third is made up of public officials, local funders, nonprofit providers of housing or social services, and other individuals who are deemed to speak for the public interest (public representatives). Control of the CLT’s board is diffused and balanced to ensure that all interests are heard but that no interest is predominant.

CLT variations: Although the governing board of nearly every CLT is distinguished by a diversity of interests and by a balance of interests, the exact make-up of this board can vary greatly from one CLT to another. Many start-up CLTs, moreover, have interim boards that are quite different in their composition from the broadly representative, member-elected, tripartite board that will ultimately govern the CLT.

Every CLT has a board or advisory committee with leaseholder representatives, but some CLTs subdivide this leaseholder category among directors who represent the interests of leaseholders occupying single-family homes and those occupying co-op units or commercial buildings. CLTs that are managing rental housing may reserve leaseholder seats for tenants. All CLTs have public representatives, but some CLTs fill these seats exclusively with representatives from local or state government, while others include within this public category representatives of local churches, foundations, banks, social service agencies, tenant rights organizations, or community development corporations.

II. OWNERSHIP: WHO HOLDS THE REAL ESTATE?

Dual Ownership

CLT classic: A nonprofit corporation (the CLT) acquires multiple parcels of land throughout its targeted geographic area with the intention of retaining ownership of these parcels forever. Any buildings already located on these lands or later constructed on these lands are eventually sold off to other parties. A building’s owner may be an individual family, a limited equity housing cooperative, a limited liability company, a cohousing community, a small business, or any other entity or combination of entities.

CLT variations: Although dual ownership is a characteristic of nearly every organization that calls itself a community land trust, buildings that are renter-occupied are sometimes treated differently than buildings that are owner-occupied. Some CLTs, when dealing with multi-unit rentals, for example, whether residential or commercial, retain ownership of the buildings as well as the land. The reverse sometimes happens in the case of multi-unit condominiums when a CLT does not own the underlying land. The CLT possesses, instead, a covenant attached to individual condominiums, granting the CLT a durable right to repurchase these condominiums for an affordable, formula-determined price when an owner later decides to sell. This has occurred most frequently in cities where a CLT has been assigned responsibility for monitoring and enforcing affordability controls over inclusionary housing units extracted from for-profit developers by a municipality.

Leased Land

CLT classic: Although CLTs plan never to resell their land, they provide for the exclusive occupancy and use of land by the owners of any buildings located thereon. Parcels of land are conveyed to homeowners (or to the owners of other types of residential or commercial structures) through ground leases that typically run for 99 years. This two-party contract gives the lessee an exclusive right to occupy the CLT’s land, while giving the lessor (i.e., the CLT) a durable right to control how the land is used and how any buildings on its land are priced, financed, repaired, and resold.

CLT variations: The ground lease employed by most CLTs in the United States for the conveyance of land is based on a model CLT ground lease that has been refined by CLT practitioners over the past 50 years. The exact terms and conditions in this two-party contract can vary greatly from one CLT to another, however, especially with regard to restrictions on subletting, improving, and reselling the buildings. Another variation has been pioneered in Puerto Rico, where the Caño Martín Peña CLT uses a surface rights deed, rather than a ground lease, to give homeowners security of tenure on land that continues to be owned by the CLT.

Diverse Development

CLT classic: The CLT is a tool of enormous flexibility, accommodating a variety of land uses, property tenures, and building types. CLTs across the United States have made land available for the construction — or for the acquisition, rehabilitation, and resale — of housing of many kinds, including single-family homes, duplexes, condominiums, cooperatives, multi-unit rental housing, homeless shelters, and mobile home parks. CLTs have helped to create nonresidential facilities for neighborhood businesses, recreation, education, job training, and the arts. CLTs have also made their lands available for uses where there are few (if any) buildings, providing sites for community gardens, urban farms, and neighborhood parks or, in more rural areas, providing extensive acreage for farming, forestry, and conservation. Community-owned land is the common ingredient, underlying all of these buildings and uses.

CLT variations: Some CLTs focus on a single type and tenure of housing, like detached, owner-occupied houses. Some focus on a single use of their land, like urban agriculture or rural farming. Other CLTs assemble a diverse portfolio of lands and buildings, taking full advantage of the model’s flexibility. The same CLT, therefore, may be the landholder and long-term steward for a mix of owner-occupied housing and renter-occupied housing or for a wide range of residential and commercial buildings.

III. OPERATION: WHAT DOES A CLT DO?

Mission-Driven Growth

CLT classic: By virtue of their charitable status and social mission, CLTs dedicate most of their resources to serving people who are economically precarious — an operational priority that is sometimes characterized as a preferential option for the poor. Spurred by the needs of people and places they serve, CLTs pursue a strategy of active acquisition, aimed at steadily expanding the number of acres, homes, and buildings brought into the CLT’s protected domain of non-market ownership and permanent affordability.

CLT variations: The scale and pace of acquisition can vary widely from one CLT to another; so can the households a CLT will serve and the roles it will play in expanding its portfolio. Some CLTs grow slowly, each year purchasing only a few parcels of land on which are constructed (or rehabilitated) a handful of single-family houses. Other CLTs grow rapidly, benefiting from private donations or public largess that allow them to acquire larger parcels of land and to develop many units of housing. Some CLTs target their activities to the very poor, while others serve households above median income.

Finally, some CLTs do development that is initiated and supervised by their own staff; others leave development to nonprofit, for-profit, or governmental partners, confining their efforts to assembling land, leasing land, and preserving the affordability of any housing entrusted to the CLT’s stewardship. Between these two extremes of the CLT-as-developer and the CLT-as-steward, there are various roles that different CLTs have embraced in expanding their holdings.

Perpetual Affordability

CLT classic: The CLT retains a preemptive option to repurchase any residential (or commercial) structures located upon its land, whenever the owners of these buildings decide to sell. The resale price is determined by a formula contained in the ground lease. This limited-equity formula is designed to give present homeowners a fair return on their investment, while giving future homebuyers fair access to housing at an affordable price. By design and by intent, the CLT is committed to preserving the affordability of housing (and other structures) forever — one owner after another, one generation after another.

CLT variations: While permanent affordability is a commitment of every CLT, the formula that defines and enforces affordability can vary greatly from one CLT to another. That is due, in part, to the different methods that CLTs adopt in calculating the resale price for any housing located upon their land. Different formulas may also result from different goals that particular CLTs are trying to achieve or from different populations they are trying to serve. Furthermore, while the vast majority of CLTs adopt a single resale formula, covering all types and tenures of housing within their portfolio — and covering every neighborhood in which they work — a few CLTs have fine-tuned their resale formulas to allow some variation among different components of their housing stock (distinguishing, for example, among detached, single-family houses, condominiums, and cooperatives). A few other CLTs have tailored their resale formula to account for varying conditions between hot and cold sub-markets within their service area.

Perpetual Responsibility

CLT classic: The CLT does not disappear once a building is sold to a homeowner, a cooperative, or some other entity. As the owner of lands beneath any number of buildings and as the owner of an option to re-purchase these buildings for a formula-determined price, the CLT has a continuing interest in what happens to the structures — and to the people who occupy them. The ground lease requires responsible use of the premises. Should a building become a hazard, the ground lease gives the CLT the right to step in and to force repairs. Similarly, should a homeowner get behind in making mortgage payments, the ground lease gives the CLT the right to step in and to cure the default, forestalling foreclosure. The CLT remains a party to the deal, safeguarding the structural integrity of buildings and the residential security of the people who occupy them.

CLT variations: Some CLTs provide a full menu of pre-purchase and post-purchase services. They go to great lengths to prepare people for the responsibilities of homeownership and to support their homeowners, in good times and bad. Other CLTs do little more than monitor and enforce the occupancy, eligibility, and affordability controls embedded in the ground lease, intervening only to prevent the loss of a building faced with foreclosure. The intensity of a CLT’s post-purchase involvement in the lives of its leaseholders depends mostly on a CLT’s capacity. It is also affected, however, by the CLT’s own preferences, as each CLT tries to find an acceptable, sustainable balance between supporting the success of newly minted homeowners, while leaving them alone to enjoy the privacy and independence that homeownership is supposed to provide.

Fig. 1.1

The Classic Community Land Trust (USA)

IV. CAUSES OF CONTINUING VARIATION

A standard definition of the classic community land trust was crafted during a formative, twenty-year period between 1972 and 1992. This conception of what it meant to be a CLT and to behave like one became the foundation on which early CLT practitioners in the United States built their organizations, projects, messaging, and brand.

The CLT did not stand still, however. Practitioners were soon hard at work tailoring the model’s features to meet local circumstances. Some of these variations occurred within the framework of the model’s basic structure and did little to alter the classic CLT. Others went much further, changing the CLT’s classic structure into something quite different. Even when that occurred, however, most organizations calling themselves a CLT retained the model’s core commitments to land stewardship, perpetual affordability, perpetual responsibility, and organizational accountability to residents of the places they serve.

There have been many causes behind the continuing process of experimentation and variation among CLTs in the United States. The most influential of these factors, causing the most significant modifications in standard features of the classic model, have been the following:

Density of the organizational landscape. In localities where a number of nonprofit housing development organizations already exist, it has occasionally been prudent and practical to establish a CLT under the sponsorship — or inside the corporate shell — of another nonprofit, instead of starting a new corporation from scratch. At other times, in other places, independently incorporated CLTs have sought a special niche within a densely populated organizational landscape by focusing on functions or roles that are not only different than those of existing nonprofits but also different than those which a classic CLT has traditionally embraced.

Density of residential development. In communities where buildable land is expensive, the development of new housing is more economical when it takes the form of multi-unit condominiums, cooperatives, rentals, or manufactured housing. Multi-unit housing works well with a CLT, but often requires modifications in the CLT’s ground lease. It may also engender modifications in the structure of a CLT’s membership and governing board. That is not to suggest that the classic CLT is to be found only in communities where detached, single-family houses on separate parcels of land are the primary form of housing production. It is to say that the experience of developing multi-unit housing has often been a spur to innovation, causing several variations in the classic model.

Requirements of funders . Changes in the model are sometimes provoked by the demands of public agencies and private lenders on which a CLT must depend for the funding and financing that make its projects possible. Innovation may also occur when a municipality looks to a CLT to serve as the long-term steward for affordability controls mandated by the municipality — either for publicly-subsidized housing on a CLT’s land or for inclusionary housing units that are scattered throughout a larger residential project.

Marketing an unfamiliar model. The CLT is sometimes modified to make an unfamiliar model of homeownership look and feel more like the deal that is typically offered to more affluent households when buying a home on the open market. By tinkering with the bundle of rights and responsibilities that are provided to a CLT leaseholder/homeowner, especially those affecting the use, improvement, and resale of a CLT home, practitioners attempt to develop and to market a form of housing that is different enough from traditional homeownership to protect the long-term interests of the community, but close enough to traditional homeownership to attract investment and support from prospective homebuyers.

Development versus organizing . It is difficult for any community-based housing organization to wear two hats. As a developer, a CLT is accountable to a constellation of funders, contractors, deadlines, and demands that drive the business of getting affordable housing constructed and occupied. As an organizer, the CLT is accountable to a constellation of interested parties who lease its land, reside within its community, make up its membership, and serve on its board. While the classic CLT strives to serve both sets of interests, this balancing act is not to the liking of everyone. For CLTs that favor development over organizing, especially where a CLT program has been grafted onto the structures and programs of an existing community development corporation or where a CLT has been initiated by a municipal government, there has sometimes been a tendency to modify, dilute, or even abandon membership features or board features that make a CLT directly accountable to a local constituency of lower-income residents. Conversely, for CLTs that favor organizing over development, there has sometimes been a tendency to spend more time on building and sustaining the organization than on building and managing an expanding stock of affordable housing. The most successful CLTs have found a sustainable balance between these extremes of the CLT-as-developer and the CLT-as-organizer.

Because of factors such as these, the CLT landscape in the United States has become increasingly diverse over the years. The model has continued to evolve. These variations have helped the model to spread into new areas and to be applied in new ways. Much of the growth in the CLT movement can, in fact, be attributed to the model’s adaptability and plasticity.

Something is lost whenever fundamental features of the classic CLT are altered, however, since there are sound philosophical and practical reasons for every one of them. On the other hand, something of value is sometimes gained. Over time, some of these variations will be discarded, while others will prove so beneficial and so effective that they eventually become a permanent part of what the classic CLT is thought to be.

Notes

1.Adapted from The Diverse World of Community Land Trusts, Chapter One of a manual authored by John Emmeus Davis in 2001 and revised in 2006. The full manual, entitled Development without Displacement: Organizational and Operational Choices in Starting a Community Land Trust, is available on-line at: burlingtonassociates.com

2.This tax exemption is granted to nonprofit organizations that are organized and operated to serve charitable purposes, as defined under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

2.

The Once and Future Garden City

Yves Cabannes and Philip Ross

Over 100 years ago, Ebenezer Howard set out on an intellectual journey to define what would make a Garden City. The result, in 1898, was his book Garden Cities of To-Morrow—A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. It was written in an age when the memory of the Paris Commune was still fresh, when Marxism was still being formulated, when imperial Europe was at its zenith, and when a young Lenin was still in a reflective mood. It was written in the shadow of the co-operative movement which showed that people were capable of coming together to build their own institutions. In the late 1800s, there were around 27,000 registered mutual societies.

The book led to the founding of Letchworth Garden City, the world’s first Garden City. Howard had been reflecting on the industrialisation process that was still underway in Britain at the time. He aimed to bring the best of town and country together in the ideal town. In Howard’s vision, the citizen would be King and the ills of the time — landlords, squalor, pollution and poverty — would be tackled and beaten.

Printed word became reality when funding was found to purchase a large parcel of land on which to build this new town. As Letchworth took shape, inspiring architecture was a key component and the layout of the town was planned with simple rules that reflected common sense. For example, factories were placed in the east so the smoke didn’t blow over the town. The architects were inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement and driven by a belief in green spaces, a healthy environment, and a sympathetic layout.¹ These were the watchwords guiding this new utopia.

However, Howard and his supporters knew that there was more to a good community and a vibrant town than a carefully designed site plan and attractive architecture. The social aspects would be of equal importance, with ownership and citizenship the key ingredients. A Garden City was designed to be just and fair for the people who would live there. At its heart was the radical proposition of the common ownership of land. This was important because the Garden City needed to be more than a well-meaning attempt to build affordable homes. Although Howard may have articulated it differently, the Garden City needed to be sustainable in the longer term. It needed to be economically sustainable in its own right, which is why the capture of rising land values was crucial. Community-owned land was needed if the Garden City was to be socially sustainable and to maintain a balance of affordability as land values rose. The Garden City also needed to be ecologically sustainable in terms of its impact on the environment. Planning played a part here, as did local food production, which was built into the heart of the model. But underlying it all was the notion that the Garden City should own itself.

Letchworth’s socialist architects, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, were soon helping to design the Hampstead Garden suburb and other areas in the UK, including Welwyn Garden City in England, built on a grander scale than Letchworth. The Garden City Movement quickly crossed the English Channel and inspired Cités Jardins in the Coal Mining Region of Northern France as early as 1905, and new towns around Brussels just after the First World War. Garden Cities appeared around Paris, as well as in Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, and The Netherlands. There were also a number established around Moscow, a result of Howard’s book having been translated into Russian as early as 1912, inspiring Russian city planners before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Garden Cities and Garden Neighbourhoods soon expanded beyond the European borders. They appeared in Cairo, Buenos Aires, and Santiago to name a few. Brazil deserves a special mention since Barry Parker, one of the principal planners of Letchworth, advised the City of São Paulo in establishing the Jardim America development between 1917 and 1919. This was the starting point for a significant number of Garden Neighbourhoods and Garden Cities throughout Brazil — more than 45 of them. The concept of Garden Cities also influenced planning in North America. Three Greenbelt towns built during the 1930s — Greendale, Wisconsin; Greenhills, Ohio; and Green-belt, Maryland — are among the most iconic examples.²

It is now more than 110 years since the founding of the first Garden City. With all this history and experience of town design, community development, and various applications of the Garden City model, it is time to ask what lessons can be learned. What should the principles of a 21st Century Garden City be? We believe that many of Howard’s original instincts were correct, but how can his vision for the Garden City be delivered in a modern setting?

Fig. 2.1. Letchworth today, still alive and beautiful. yves cabannes

GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF A GARDEN CITY

The place to start is with a declaration that a Garden City is a fair, just, and harmonious community. It should be a place that is economically, socially and ecologically sustainable. It is not restricted to new cities or towns, even to those that were built following traditional Garden City town planning, architectural, or design principles. A Garden City is about community, not merely about architecture and urban design. It is about building a harmonious community, balancing and combining the best of town and country to create a community where the measure of success is ultimately the happiness of the people who live in it.

As described in a manifesto we published in 2014, there are twelve principles that we believe underlie a Garden City in the 21st Century.³ They are inspired by Howard’s ideas, by the legacy of Letchworth, and by successful international practice. We declare that any town or city or neighbourhood can be considered a Garden City if it embraces the following principles:

Residents are citizens.

The Garden City owns itself.

The Garden City is energy efficient and carbon neutral.

The Garden City provides access to land for living and working to all.

Fair Trade principles are practised.

Prosperity is shared.

All citizens are equal, all citizens are different.

There is fair representation and direct democracy.

Garden Cities are produced through participatory planning and design methods.

A City of Rights builds and defends the Right to the City.

Knowledge is held in common, shared and enhanced.

Wealth and harmony are measured by happiness.

Fig. 2.2. Cover of the 2014 Manifesto. Earlier editions appeared in 2012 and 2013.

These principles represent multiple doorways into the Garden City. You can enter using any of them, but deny or contradict any one of them and they become exits. Let’s concentrate, however, on the principle that is most relevant to community land trusts: the Garden City owns itself. That doesn’t mean that CLTs do not also strive to put the other principles into practice. But land that is owned and managed for the common good is the main intersection between the Garden City and the CLT.

THE GARDEN CITY OWNS ITSELF

The Garden City is ultimately owned by its local community and not by a series of landlords. This ownership and governance is derived from the people who live and work in the city and who are its citizens acting for the common good. If the Garden City is its own landlord, then it is answerable to and controlled by its citizens, ideally as a community land trust managed by democratic structures that make it both inclusive and accountable.

This principle is the most powerful of all because it is a tangible realisation of citizenship. It is about the real and tangible ownership of the Garden City. It is about common and collective forms of tenure of the city and citizen control of the assets within it. Ownership itself isn’t enough, however. There must also be participation: active citizens who are capable of holding the landowner to account. Otherwise the Garden City will not work.

We believe that if people who live in a city have a stake in its prosperity, that will help to engender the idea of citizenship. This is what Ebenezer Howard understood when he envisaged the first Garden City. The Garden City was not to be a charity or something held benignly in trust; it was to have common ownership. Nor was it about people holding just passive paper-shares in the city, speculating on its success, but instead participating in it, building it, making it an "oeuvre