Anna Bergren Miller: Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are nonprofit entities dedicated to maintaining community control of real property outside conventional, speculative land and housing markets. Though they may serve other ends — including the stewardship of green space or agricultural land — CLTs are typically designed around the provision of permanently affordable housing for low-income individuals and families.

The features of CLTs vary by country. However, many are patterned after the original United States model and have the following features in common. The central feature is that CLTs separate ownership of land and houses. CLT’s allow residents to buy a house while securing a long-term lease on the underlying land from the CLT. While the trust is typically organized as a nonprofit steered by a board of directors comprised of CLT homeowners, area residents, and other stakeholders, it maintains permanent ownership of the land while the homeowner owns the house and any improvements to it.

Resale of the house is restricted to CLT-approved buyers. In addition to the principal investment and the value of improvements, the house seller recoups a limited portion of the house’s appreciation on terms contracted in advance with the CLT. This setup protects CLT housing from appreciation typical of housing markets to ensure at least some permanently affordable housing for the community.

The CLT concept was developed by Robert Swann, who was in turn inspired by Ralph Borsodi. Swann and Borsodi shared an interest in the Indian “Gramdan,” or village gift movement. Other historical precursors including Native American land-use practices and the New England commons. In partnership with Slater King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s cousin, Swann established the first CLT in the U.S. in Albany, Georgia. New Communities Inc. was explicitly modeled on the Jewish National Fund’s Israel land-lease policy.

Although growing, the worldwide CLT movement remains relatively small. Nonetheless, a 2011 survey identified nearly 250 CLTs in the U.S. alone. CLTs are also active in several other countries including Belgium, France, Italy, Kenya, Australia, New Zealand, and England. Vermont’s (CHT) is the largest CLT in the United States. Founded in 1984 as two separate nonprofit organizations that merged in 2006, CHT operates in three counties and oversees 565 owner occupied homes plus 2,200 rental apartments. The trust offers other services — including homeowner education, home improvement and energy efficiency loans, and assistance — to five housing cooperatives.

CHT’s shared equity program sells homes on trust-owned land to prospective homeowners who meet certain income and asset requirements. Homebuyers pay closing costs of $6,000-8,000, but the down payment (20-30 percent of market value) is covered by state and federal grants. Upon resale, CHT homeowners receive their original contribution plus 25 percent of any appreciation. In 2015, 44 new CHT residents purchased homes at an average CHT net price of $137,214, for an average CHT monthly cost of $994.78.

Because CLTs are effective in expanding affordable housing, cities are increasingly supporting them in various ways, including policy.

View a report on CLT policies here.

Learn more from:

• National Community Land Trust Network
• 2011 CLT survey
• Shareable article

Photo by T Hall

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Anna Bergren Miller: Here’s the problem: As home prices soar, cities around the world face a crisis of affordability. In London, U.K., the situation is especially acute: According to a 2016 Lloyds Bank study, the ratio of average home sales price compared to average earnings is 10-to-6. Without the means to meet monthly mortgage costs (let alone a down payment) low- and moderate-income residents are often locked out of home ownership and the opportunity to build equity. Meanwhile, land use is determined by profit maximization rather than nonmaterial factors like social inclusion and environmental sustainability.

Here’s how one organization is working on the problem: One response to this affordability crisis is the use of community land trusts. Community land trusts permanently remove land from the conventional property market and distribute long-term leases according to community priorities, thereby increasing the supply of affordable housing. London Community Land Trust (LCLT), the capital city’s first such organization, originated in negotiations between the activist group now known as Citizens UK and the 2012 Olympic bid team. When the bid team suggested a pilot community land trust project, the newly-formed LCLT (until 2015, the East London Community Land Trust) worked with the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority to incorporate community land trust housing into a scheme to redevelop St. Clements Hospital, shuttered since 2005. In fact, LCLT has secured an agreement to build at least 20 community land trust homes on the East Wick and Sweetwater neighborhood, and is supporting similar efforts in Lewisham.

Results:

• LCLT allocated the homes to income-qualified applicants from an original pool of 700. The homes will be sold at approximately one-third of their open market value: one-, two-, and three-bedroom homes at £130,000, £182,000, and £235,000 ($168,000, $235,000, and $304,000), respectively.
• Resale is restricted to LCLT-approved prospective buyers, with home sellers to recoup their original investment plus a portion of appreciated value as contracted with LCLT. Other community benefits include sustainable architecture, green spaces and play areas, community space in a refurbished St. Clements building, and proximity to public transit and Cemetery Park.
• The larger St. Clements project, comprising 252 new homes built by Linden Homes with JTP Architects (architect and master planner) and the Greater London Authority, has received several awards, including Overall Winner and Best Scheme in Planning at the National Housing Awards 2014.

Learn more from:

• London Community Land Trust
• National Community Land Trust Network
• Summary of the 2011 Comprehensive CLT survey

This case study is adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Get a copy today.

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Anna Bergren Miller: When the City Council of Barcelona asked democracy activist and researcher Mayo Fuster Morell for policy recommendations regarding the sharing economy, she suggested that the City Council take a different approach: Rather than relying on an expert to dictate policy from the top down, why not use a collaborative process to build a sustainable set of institutions and practices that would draw strength from the grassroots?

Fuster Morell crowdsourced a sharing economy policy framework through a series of in-person and online interactions with a range of stakeholders, including city residents, representatives of sharing economy initiatives, and municipal authorities. From the 120 policy recommendations initially drafted, Barcelona’s city council has since developed a collaborative economy action plan and provided funding to specific projects. Meanwhile, the broader conversation on the sharing economy in Barcelona continues through organizations including Procomuns, which started in March 2016 as a policy brainstorming forum.

I spoke to Fuster Morell recently about the process behind and the prospects for the Barcelona policy recommendations. We talked through what Fuster Morell calls Barcelona’s collaborative economy “ecosystem,” the status of the collaborative economy plan, and the replicability of the Catalan capital’s particular approach to sharing.

Anna Bergren Miller: You were instrumental in helping craft a series of policy recommendations regarding the sharing economy in the city of Barcelona. How did the policy recommendations come to be? Specifically, how did you involve city residents in the process?

Mayo Fuster Morell: Barcelona City Council asked me to advise them about what to do regarding the collaborative economy. I suggested that we build an ecosystem of public policies involving the different stakeholders. This way, even if there is a change of government in the next election, the city will have a structure of actors and relationships already in place.

At the City Council of Barcelona there is a lack of expertise in this matter. They don’t know about the technologies, or the companies involved because it’s pretty new. We have an historical tradition of commons production in the city. But until this government, there hasn’t been an institutional interest in supporting collaboration.

We built the stakeholder ecosystem in layers. The first layer is BarCola, a coworking group between the city council and the sector. To join BarCola as an initiative, you have to be active in Barcelona. We privilege organizations that take a commons approach, which means that they are based on cooperatives, foundations, or enterprises that have a democratic government system. We prioritize projects that are based on open source or open data, that are connected to social challenges in the city, and that have socially inclusive policies.

BarCola meets every month or month and a half. We also communicate frequently on a mailing list and Telegram. Our main concern is promotion. For example, we are not so much about penalizing Airbnb, as about how we build an incubating system and funding for new initiatives, to promote the modalities that we are more in favor of. The second layer of the ecosystem is Procomuns, which started as an event in March to open the proposals for policy recommendations for the city council. Four hundred people participated, and spent three days discussing how the city council can do support a commons development, and a collaborative economy. The event resulted in the Procomuns declaration with 120 policy recommendations. We sent it to Barcelona City Council, obviously, but also to European Commission and other organizations.

Now Procomuns is a monthly Meetup. At each meeting, we address different issues. We are going to do another big event at the end of June, in Barcelona. Out of the initial 120 policy recommendations emerged the third layer of the ecosystem, which is Decidem Barcelona. Decidem Barcelona is a participatory democracy platform for citizens to provide feedback on municipal policies in every area. Using Decidem Barcelona, we selected the policies that were more supported by Barcelona residents. With that, we defined the Barcelona collaborative economy plan, which has 80 percent of the 120 policies generated by Procomuns. It doesn’t have them all, because there are some areas that are not under the competency of Barcelona City Council.

Now we have a final layer of the ecosystem. We created an inter-area body inside of the city council, which coordinates what we are doing regarding transport, housing, tourism, and labor. This layer operates solely within the municipal government.

Tell me more about the city council’s response. Was creating a collaborative economy plan something that they were encouraging you to do, or did you bring it to them? How receptive were they, and where have they taken it since?

The current Barcelona government started 18 months ago as a citizens’ candidature with many non-professional politicians. For example, our mayor Ada Colau was very active in the housing movement. All of them were very much in support the idea of injecting the citizens into the policy process. There was not resistance.

But some of the city council, when they think about the collaborative economy, they only think about Uber or Airbnb. They are not aware of the other movements. So the first step actually was a bit hard. We had to say, okay, the collaborative economy is not only the big for-profit actors.

What is the current status of the Barcelona policies?

The city now has a collaborative economy plan and budget. The plan is not available online, but to give you some examples of the measures involved: We created a program of entrepreneurship on the collaborative economy. We did a call for new initiatives, and we selected 30, to which we will provide mentorship, legal advice, and match funding. Like with BarCola, we prioritize the initiatives that are more connected to the commons. We have also been mapping the city council’s underutilized infrastructure resources, starting with computers, in order to put them to collaborative uses by the citizens. We have also begun a €100,000 match funding program, and are designing a collaborative economy incubator.

We support a lot of events. We provide funding for OuiShare; we provide funding for the local annual meeting of the social economy. We support the annual meeting of the city’s cooperatives. We also supported an event about do-it-yourself technology. We have a study underway on the level of participation in the collaborative economy within Barcelona. We are also developing a framework for understanding its impact.

What’s the timeline for the study?

The study will be ready in July.

A lot of what you’ve been able to do seems specific to Barcelona, to the political climate and the history and culture there. But have you heard from other cities that have wanted to model your process? Or were you looking at other cities as examples?

I think it’s very unique to Barcelona, this element of believing that collaborative economy policy should be built collaboratively. We also have a very clear position regarding which initiatives are the best models to promote. But we are not unique in providing some programs of support. For example, Seoul has put a lot of resources into promoting the collaborative economy. Also, Amsterdam is providing a lot of resources, but with a different perspective.

The geographer David Harvey has recently written and spoken about so-called “Rebel Cities.” Barcelona has been identified as part of a nascent network of Rebel Cities. What is a Rebel City? Why do they matter now? And what evidence is there that they are beginning to work together?

In the context of Spain, “Rebel Cities” refers to the cities that are governed by citizens’ candidatures as of the last municipal elections. In each case, a unique coalition won power — so they have their independence. But, recognizing the affinities between then, we built a network of Rebel Cities in order to exchange experiences and learn from each other. We recently suggested a similar process, building on Spain’s experience, for Rebel Cities in the United States.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Header photo of the city of Barcelona by Bert Kaufmannvia Flickr. 

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Anna Bergren Miller: When mortgage activist Ada Colau prevailed in Barcelona’s May 2015 mayoral elections, she made headlines worldwide as a double first. The first woman to achieve the city’s highest office, Colau had, moreover, entered the race not as a representative of one of several entrenched political parties, but as a spokeswoman for Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common), a citizens’ platform dedicated to democratizing the city’s political, economic, and social structures.

In the wake of Colau’s victory, grassroots activists around the world wondered: How did they do it? How did Barcelona en Comú’s diverse supporters overcome the external and internal obstacles to bottom-up political revolution? To answer these questions, the International Committee of Barcelona en Comú earlier this year published How to Win Back the City en Comú: Guide to Building a Citizen Municipal Platform, a brief but specific summary of the Catalan group’s electoral strategy.

One of the most important points the pamphlet addresses has to do with Barcelona en Comú’s decision to engage in municipal electoral politics in the first place—a focus that other activists might criticize as overly narrow. Barcelona en Comú’s entry into the 2015 mayoral race was not a symptom of a lack of imagination. Rather, it was a strategic choice, a pragmatic first step to a total transformation of the city’s political, economic, and social institutions. “The proximity of municipal governments to the people makes them the best opportunity we have to take the change from the streets to the institutions,” explain the guide’s authors.

Barcelona en Comú crowdsourced its program for the 2015 mayoral campaign. (How to Win Back the City en Comú: Guide to Building a Citizen Municipal Platform)

As for the nuts and bolts of grassroots electoral politics, How to Win Back the City en Comú has plenty to offer would-be revolutionaries in other cities. A citizens’ platform, the guide’s authors insist, will not be successful if it is not specific to the municipality’s politico-economic context and expressive of genuine bottom-up sentiment. It should strive for gender parity: “A revolution that isn’t feminist isn’t worthy of the name.” Perhaps most importantly, a citizens’ platform is not a political party, nor is it a vehicle for a particular party’s views—nor even a coalition of parties as traditionally understood. Creating a citizens’ platform involves cooperation, not competition, a reframing of politics around shared priorities rather than party allegiance.

Barcelona en Comú organizational structure. (How to Win Back the City en Comú: Guide to Building a Citizen Municipal Platform)

How to Win Back the City en Comú outlines both the organizational structure of Barcelona en Comú and the chronology of its 2014-15 campaign. Importantly, the former involved a combination of public forums (both in-person and online), specialist committees, and individual spokespeople (of whom Colau was one). The latter utilized crowdsourcing technology to distill widespread discontent with the political and economic status quo to a set of concrete commitments Colau adopted upon taking office.

As Barcelona en Comú acknowledges, the details of “En Comú” electoral campaigns elsewhere will necessarily differ according to on-the-ground conditions. But what better place to start than with a successful example of political revolution from below?

Cross-posted from Shareable.

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Anna Bergren Miller: The City as Commons is an important new resource for urban commons activists. (Graphic by Scott Boylston)

The cover of The City as Commons: A Policy Reader, published recently by Melbourne, Australia’s Commons Transition Coalition, features a repeated pattern of overlapping spirals and circular clusters of node-and-line shapes. The graphic, explains designer Scott Boylston (SCAD professor and president of Emergent Structures), was inspired by biophysicist Harold Morowitz‘s proposal of the how the preconditions for life on Earth may have been created. “The human city reminds me of Morowitz’s description of an open and vital membrane that creates conditions for the emergence of new ideas,” writes Boylston, who contributed a chapter on the re-use of construction waste to the book. “I see urban commoning as a ‘new’ metabolism that has the potential for generating new forms of life/living/being.”

Edited by José Maria Ramos, The City as Commons is a reference for individuals and groups who, like Boylston, believe that a re-imagining of shared resources (from intellectual property to real property) through a lens that prioritizes social and environmental sustainability over financial profits can transform the lives of humans for the better. It is also an important record of some of the commons-centric projects and policies already underway or in development around the world. The “urban” emphasis of “urban commoning” refers to the central role played by cities in the commoning process, both as the collectors of the most urgent physical, social, and environmental needs, and as the geographical and governmental entities arguably best equipped to drive change.

The 34 contributions to The City as Commons are divided into sections including Space, Value Exchange, Production, Governance, Land, Knowledge, Culture, and Accounts. The categories necessarily overlap, and the content itself is somewhat rough around the edges, with variations in voice, format, and point of origin (some are repurposed blog posts or other publications; at least one summarizes a conference). Rather than weakening the total product, these irregularities affirm the book’s identity as a conversation starter, a work-in-progress designed to encourage experimentation and revision even as it seeks to pin down some of the recent theoretical and practical developments in urban commoning.

Though the “Accounts” section, to which Shareable’s co-founder Neal Gorenflo contributed, is most explicitly framed around real-world examples, all of the authors include strategy and/or policy recommendations in their chapters. The geographical and topical scope of The City as Commons is impressive, as is the list of commentators and practitioners who have contributed to the collection. These include P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens, Prosper Australia project director Karl Fitzgerald, 596 Acres founding director Paula Z. Segal, and Julian Agyeman and Duncan McLaren, authors of Sharing Cities: A Case for Truly Smart and Sustainable Cities. The City as Commons deserves a place on the bookshelf (or hard drive) of activists already involved in contemporary commoning, as well as of citizens more generally interested in promoting the physical, social, and environmental wellbeing of their communities.

Glenwood Green Acres is a community garden built on formerly vacant land in North Central Philadelphia. (Tony Fischer / Flickr)

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