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

The post How community land trusts create affordable housing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the meantime, I have been getting out and about a bit. On September 29, I delivered a keynote talk at the Prairie Festival in Salina, Kansas, hosted by The Land Institute. The annual festival, now 40 years old, brings together several hundred progressives from around the country concerned about agriculture, food, land, and social change.

The Land Institute, founded by a hero of mine, Wes Jackson, is a leading independent agricultural research center. Its plant breeders and ecologists have an ambitious mission: to develop “an agriculture system that mimics natural systems in order to produce ample food and reduce or eliminate the negative impacts of industrial agriculture.”

One of the most impressive achievements of the Land Institute is its development of a perennial wheat called Kernza, which could radically reduce the ecological impact of conventional agriculture. The Institute is also developing a range of other crops using the principles of “perennial polyculture,” which relies on complementary, mutually supportive crops in the same field.

The event’s main events were held in a large, open barn that felt unusual warm and intimate despite the chilly weather that day. A print version of my remarks are below; a video can be seen here. (My talk starts at the timemark 41:00 and goes through 1:22.)

Thank you, Fred Iutzi and the Land Institute for inviting me to this wonderful festival!   It’s a great honor to be speaking at an event at which so many illustrious thinkers, innovators, and activists have attended in the past. I want to thank the Land Institute for its pathbreaking research and leadership over the years – and give a special thanks to Wes Jackson for his vision, courage, and sheer persistence over so many years.

I’m not a farmer or seed-sharer, and I don’t have a specific role in the farm-to-table world except as a grateful eater. However, I do live in a small, somewhat rural town, Amherst, Massachusetts, a place of maple trees and CSA farms, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, and… a town common.

It is in that capacity that I come before you today, as a commoner. Much more about that shortly, but suffice it to say that the commons, to me, is a vehicle for social and political emancipation. My new book, written with my German colleague Silke Helfrich and due out next year, captures three touchstones of commoning in its title — Free, Fair & Alive. It’s all about lived experience, not ideology, and more about living systems that emerge from the bottom up than about policies imposed from above.

I want to start with a blunt and perhaps jarring statement, that we are embroiled in a deep and serious war – a war against the imagination. This phrase comes from Beat poet Diane di Prima, who wrote:

The war that matters is the war against the imagination

all other wars are subsumed in it….

the war is the war for the human imagination

and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you

The imagination is not only holy, it is precise

it is not only fierce, it is practical

men die everyday for the lack of it,

it is vast & elegant.

“The ultimate famine,” di Prima warns, “is the starvation of the imagination.”

When an artist-friend shared these lines with me, I realized how profoundly they speak to our times. In today’s world, there seems to be very little room in respectable circles for wide-open dreaming and experimentation, or for stepping off in new directions to explore the unknown. But the realm of the unknown is precisely where we really start to see and live.

In today’s world there are certain presumptions that serious people aren’t supposed to question, such as the necessity of economic growth and capital accumulation, and the importance of strong consumer demand and expansive private property rights. The more of these we have, the better, we are told.

These dogmas have sucked all the air out of our public life and politics.  Which is one reason that I have come to see the commons as a precious patch of ground — an important staging area for thinking and living our way past the prevailing orthodoxies. The commons is a space from which an insurgency might be launched – indeed, it IS being launched, if you train your eyes to see it.

In the next few minutes, I’d like to suggest how the commons paradigm can help us develop a new social and cultural vision, and new strategies for practical change. Paradoxically enough, redirecting our attention away from conventional politics and policy may offer the most promising possibilities for developing a transformational vision.

We’re surely reaching a point of diminishing returns within the existing system. Real change and regeneration are going to require that we jump the tracks somehow. We need to start imagining different ways of being, doing, and knowing – and we need to invent new institutional structures to support such a paradigm shift.

Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons

Let me first clarify what I mean by the commons – a term that is greatly misunderstood and misused. For most people, the first thing that comes to mind when you mention the word “commons” is tragedy – as in the “tragedy of the commons.”

That idea was put into circulation by biologist Garrett Hardin in a now-famous essay published by the journal Science in 1968. Hardin said, Imagine a pasture on which farmers can put as many sheep as they want. The result, he said, would inevitably be the over-exploitation of the pasture. No individual farmer would have a “rational” incentive to hold back, and so the sheep would over-graze and ruin the pasture, resulting in the tragedy of the commons.

What a tenacious little smear this has been! Over the past two generations, economists and conservative ideologues have embraced the “tragedy parable” as a powerful way to denigrate the collective management of resources, especially by government. Hardin’s just-so story has also proved useful for celebrating private property rights and, by implication, free markets and government deregulation.

The problem is, Hardin was spinning out a fantasy. It has no empirical basis. He was not describing any actual commons. He was describing an open-access regime – a free-for-all — in which there is no community, no rules for managing resources, no boundaries around them, no penalties for overuse or free-riding, etc. That’s not a commons. A commons consists of a community plus a shared resource and a set of social agreements, practices, traditions, etc., for governing it.

The scenario Hardin was describing more accurately describes market economics in which everyone is a disconnected individual defined by their “utility-maximizing rationality” and competitiveness, which makes you a sucker to restrain yourself. You might say that Hardin was really describing the tragedy of the market – “Grab what you want and forget about the mess you leave behind.”

The late Professor Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University powerfully rebutted the whole “tragedy of the commons” fable in her landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons. She won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work in 2009 – the first woman to win the award. Ostrom and hundreds of scholars explained how countless communities around the world have self-organized themselves to manage natural resources without over-exploiting them – all of this outside of the market and state power.

Why, then, are these systems generally ignored by economists?  Because when you’re studying market transactions as the main event of life, anything that doesn’t involve cash and market exchange isn’t all that interesting.

And yet commons are everywhere. They are the ancient heritage of the human species. The International Land Coalition has estimated that there are over 2.5 billion people in the world whose daily lives today depend upon forests, fisheries, farmland, irrigation water, and wild game managed as commons. It’s the default mode of provisioning through nature! Yet to we moderns, commons remain mostly invisible – or misrepresented as ineffective and marginal.  Doomed to failure.

The huge achievement of Ostrom and her academic colleagues was to provide scholarly validation for the commons as a system of governance and provisioning. Ostrom showed that cooperation is actually economically consequential, something that her colleagues, most of them males, scoffed at.

A Movement of Commoners Arises

Meanwhile, outside of academia, a related story was developing on a parallel track over the past twenty years. A self-replicating movement of commoners was arising to build an empire of their own – an insurgent, diversified network based on the ideas of commoning. Yes, the commons is not so much a noun as a verb.

Commoning is the social process by which people come together, figure out the terms of their peer governance, learn how to devise fair systems, how to deal with rule-breakers, how build a cohesive culture, and so forth. Who are these commoners? They include:

• farmers, villagers, pastoralists, and fishers who use community systems to manage crops, pastures, irrigation water, trees, wild game, fish….

• “Localists” who want to restore the self-determination of their communities through community land trusts, CSA farms, alternative currencies and time-banking systems, among other commons.

• There are Croatians fighting enclosures of their public spaces and coastal lands, and Greeksdeveloping mutual aid systems to fight the neoliberal economic policies that have decimated that nation.

• There is a rich Francophone network of commoners, and others in Spain, Italy, the UK, and India.

• A new “municipalism” of urban commons is arising in cities like Barcelona, Amsterdam, Seoul, and Bologna to establish commons-based Wi-Fi systems, public spaces, social projects, limits on development, and more.

• Indigenous peoples are arguably the oldest commoners, fighting to defend their ethnobotanical knowledge and biocultural practices.

• A vast network of digital commoners are creating free and open source software….building open-access publishing systems….“platform cooperatives” as alternatives to Uber and Airbnb….wikis and makerspaces and Fab Labs.

Through some form of spontaneous convergence – or rising of a collective unconscious – these various groups are discovering the commons and using it as a lingua franca. While they all traffic in very different resources and in very different circumstances, most of them have a least one thing in common — a victimization by global markets and capital.

Enclosure and the War Against Imagination

This brings us to the word “enclosure.” It is a word that helps commoners fight the war against the imagination. Enclosure names the great harms that occur when the market/state system privatizes and encloses our common wealth. Enclosure happens when something managed by a social cohort or rooted in an ecosystem is redefined as a market commodity. It is ripped from its context, converted into private property, and sold. Its price becomes its value.

This is an act of radical dispossession – the kind that defined the English enclosure movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which millions of commoners were evicted from their forests and pastures, and forced to migrate to cities and England’s dark satanic mills.

We are now in the midst of a second major enclosure movement. This time, it is using less violent but even more effective weapons of dispossession. These include intellectual property law, digital technologies, Big Data and algorithms, and, as needed, raw state coercion and market power. As in the past, the mission is to seize the common wealth for private profitmaking.

Enclosure happens when the Hunt brothers buy up vast tracts of groundwater in the Midwest, turning priceless repositories of life into speculative commodities to be sold to the highest bidders.

Enclosure happens when biotech and pharmaceutical companies patent genetic information about plants and seeds, and medicines and diseases. One fifth of the human genome is now owned by companies as patents. The German company BASF owns more than 6,000 patents derived from genetic sequences in 862 marine organisms.

Enclosure happens when industrial agriculture converts a living landscape into a vast, quasi-dead vessel of soil to grow monoculture crops. It occurs when the traditional sharing and cultivating of seeds are criminalized – which is happening today.

Enclosure is happening today in Africa and Asia, as sovereign investment funds and hedge funds collude with governments to buy land that have been used for generations by subsistence communities and indigenous tribes. It’s a huge land grab that is displacing millions of people and triggering new migrations to urban shantytowns and future famines: the English enclosure movement revisited.

Amazingly, American politics and economics don’t have a name for the idea of enclosure.  Instead it’s usually called “innovation,” “wealth creation,” and “progress.” The language of the commons helps us debunk these modern-day fairy tales.

The Commons and Place-Based Stewardship

What does all of this talk of the commons have to do with rural America and farming, ecosystems and human well-being?

I’d like to propose that the commons discourse can help us break out of the claustrophobic mindset of contemporary politics and economics, especially as they apply to rural America. The concepts and language of the commons – and scores of real-life projects – can open up new ways of thinking that go beyond the traditional “progress narratives” of growth and “development.”

As the era of climate change descends upon us – as we begin to recognize the fragility and costs of global supply chains for food, energy, and water; as we learn how giant corporations work with government to consolidate market power and squeeze out small players; as we discover how markets tend to flatten the distinctiveness of place and identity, and propagate inequality and division – we are learning what pre-moderns have known for millennia: Place-based stewardship and community self-reliance can offer more ecologically rooted, humane, and satisfying ways to live.

But how can we possibly work for such a vision? One thing is for sure, it won’t come via Washington, D.C., or new trade policies or farm bills, at least not primarily. It will first require some deeper cultural and personal shifts from us – and the development of new sorts of commons-based institutions.

It will require that we wean ourselves away from a mindset that is transactional – which is the essence of capitalist markets and culture, a mindset deeply embedded within each of us – and learn to embrace a mindset that at its core is relational, where we see ourselves as interconnected and interdependent, and can show our vulnerabilities as humans without being taken advantage of.

That’s where I see the commons helping to catalyze a transformation. The language and framing of the commons helps name this different order of life. Evolutionary sciences are showing that the hyper-individualistic story told by conventional economics is an utter fantasy. As E.O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, and Martin Nowak (among others) have shown, we are a species that has evolved through cooperation.

We are not free-floating individuals without histories or social ties, untouched by geography or community. In reality, we are all nested-I’s – individuals nested within larger biological webs and within social collectives that profoundly shape us. Land and natural systems are not mere resources as the price-system implies. They are what I call care-wealth.

It’s this relationality that needs to be brought to the foreground. As Thomas Berry put it memorably: “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” This is the ontological shift – the OntoShift – that we need to make as a culture and find ways to enact through projects and express through language.

In a sense, that’s the purpose of the commons. It’s a rediscovered term that is being used to describe some ancient realities. It expresses the spiritual connections of indigenous peoples to the land and the cosmos. The commons is about the land ethic that Aldo Leopold wrote about. It echoes what Rachel Carson said about the subtle interconnectedness of all living things, and what Wendell Berry has so beautifully written about the human satisfactions of working with a landscape.

 A commons is about having responsibilities and entitlements that flow from them; stepping up to long-term stewardship; making up the rules of governance from the bottom up, with an accent on fairness, participation, and inclusiveness; and the inalienability of certain things. Some things just aren’t for sale.

In short, it’s all about relationality!  It is here where a new vision for rural America needs to begin.

Much has been made about the linkages between rural America and Trump voters – a linkage that I think has been vastly overblown. Trump brilliantly exploits genuine needs, and preys upon fears and desperation. But if we think more deeply about what’s important to us and what makes for quality of life over the long term, the answers won’t be ideological. They must be human, and they must grow their own new legal, economic, and institutional vessels.

The standard wisdom is that farmers, agricultural suppliers, and rural businesses should double-down and try to compete more effectively in integrated global markets. They should get leaner and meaner and smarter, goes the pep talk. They should demand greater government subsidies and new forms of support. This is fair enough, so far as it goes.

But we’ve seen how this approach is fraught with problematic risks. Are we really prepared to accept permanent subordination to the corporate seed, biotech, and chemical giants? Do we really want to build a future based on volatile energy and food prices in an era of Peak Oil and climate change? Can we depend on dwindling supplies of water from elsewhere and owned by someone else, and on the shifting sands of international trade policies and tariffs?

The Commons and Rural Futures

I’d like to suggest that the a more constructive and secure long-term vision is for communities to become more locally autonomous and self-directed….. to become less dependent on the global and national markets, many of which treat rural America as sites for neocolonial extraction in any case.

The more promising answers lie in greater relocalization and community self-reliance….in decommodifying our daily needs as possible; in working with the land and not abusing it; in sharing infrastructure and collaborations with other commoners; and in mutualizing the benefits that are generated.

This was roughly the strategy that civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer used fifty years ago when she and others purchased 680 acres of Mississippi Delta land and named them “Freedom Farms.” The goal was to provide access to land so that African-Americans could grow their own food cooperatively. “When you’ve got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around and tell you what to say or do,” she said.

That is the beauty of commoning. It’s practical. You could say that it draws from the best of all political ideologies: Conservatives like the tendency of commons to promote responsibility. Liberals are pleased with the focus on equality and basic social entitlement. Libertarians like the emphasis on individual initiative. And leftists like the idea of limiting the scope of the market. It’s all about cultivating a mindset of mutual support and building durable systems of relationality.

In the few minutes that remain, I’d like to quickly review some of these cooperative, benefit-sharing, relational approaches.

It seems appropriate to start with the Land Institute’s Kernza wheat and other perennial crops. Could one imagine an agricultural innovation more in sync with natural systems? It absorbs more water than conventional wheat, prevents runoff and erosion, captures more carbon, and provides year-round habitat for wildlife – while of course providing a tasty food for we humans. Kernza has enormous potential for bringing humans into a deeper, more regenerative relationship with the land itself – which will surely enhance the stability of agricultural towns.

I am thrilled by another commons-in-the-making, the Open Source Seed Initiative. Its basic purpose is to decommodify seeds to make them freely breedable and shareable, under terms set by commoners themselves. Currently, more than 400 varieties of seeds and fifty-one species have become what I would call “relationalized property” – legally shareable seeds that can participate in the gift-economy of nature and yet cannot be privatized.

Of course, land is another precious resource that has already been enclosed by capital or faces constant threats of enclosure. How can land be made more affordable and accessible, especially for young farmers, and be deployed as an object of stewardship, not simply ruthless market exploitation?

We know that community land trusts are a powerful vehicle for land reform. They are a way for communities to take land off the speculative market and use them for long-term community purposes, such as workforce housing, town improvements, sustainable agriculture, and recreation.

Again: the strategy of decommodify and share. A CLT is a kind of commons because it socializes and collectivizes economic rent, and then invests it back into the community that helps create it. It’s a social organism for regenerating value, through democratic governance and open membership in its classic form.

More recently, the Schumacher Center has been developing an offshoot of community-supported agriculture – community-supported industry. The idea is to use community land trust structures in novel ways to help decommodify land and buildings in a town. They can then be used for all sorts of “import-replacement” enterprises – production, retail, food – that recirculates dollars within the region.

In terms of re-purposing land, I recently learned about the FaithLands movement. It’s a small but growing movement of churches, monasteries, and other religious bodies offering up their land for community-minded agriculture, ecological restoration, and social justice projects. It turns out that religious organizations own a lot of tax-free land, and so they can potentially act like conservation organizations or land trusts.

A farmer working on church land said: “Our scripture starts with Genesis in the garden and ends with Revelation in a garden in the city—with Jesus in the middle inviting us to a meal. If we’re seeking to transform our food system in a way that’s going to be beneficial not only for ourselves, but for our great grandchildren, how can the church put [its] land into service?”

Simply asking, “What does the land want?” and “How can we feed the hungry?” lets us consider the radical idea of food itself as a commons. Why shouldn’t food be recognized as a basic human need available to all, and not merely as a private, transnational commodity? A famous essay published in 1988 called for returning a vast portion of the Great Plains to native prairie as a “Buffalo Commons.” That never happened, of course, but it did provoke valuable debates that have sparked some actual projects that move in this direction. A dialogue about food commons could have similar effects.

If a larger Commons Sector is going to arise and flourish, however, we will need more than small-scale, one-off projects. We need larger shared infrastructure to take things to the next level. This can open up new opportunities for commoning while thwarting the possibility of business monopolies and proprietary lock-ins, as we see in seed patents, exclusive supply chains, and the like.

I am thrilled to learn of the supply infrastructure created by farmers in the area north of Boston, along the seacoast of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. The Three River Farmers Alliance has brought together a variety of local producers to aggregate and distribute their foods. The shared distribution system helps them escape a dependency on powerful middlemen and build new bonds of trust among themselves. An open source farm-management software platform lets each farm function independently while also letting each opt-in to share knowledge and cooperate with others. This works only because there are shared data protocols managed as a commons.

Or consider the Fresno Commons in Fresno, California, which is reinventing the whole farm-to-table supply chain under the control of a series of community trusts. This is helping farmers, distributors, retailers, and others to mutualize risks and benefits throughout the value-chain. The “profit” doesn’t get siphoned off to investors, but is used to improve wages and working conditions, grow food without pesticides, make food more affordable to low-income people, etc.

These stories point to the critical role that digital network technologies can play in bringing gig-economy efficiencies down to the local level. But this is not just about market efficiencies and automated administration; it’s about building tech-based affordances for new forms of cooperation in today’s world.

Another such platform is called cosmo-local production. This is an emerging production process in which knowledge and design – the light-weight stuff – are co-developed and shared with collaborators around the world via the Internet. Then the heavy, physical tasks of production are done locally, in open source ways — which is to say, in ways that are inexpensive, modular, locally sourceable, and protected from enclosure. This is the idea behind Farm Hack, a global community of open source designers of all sorts of farm equipment.

Cosmo-local production is also being used to design electronics (Arduino), video animations (Blender Institute), cars (Wikispeed), houses (Wikihouse), and furniture (Open Desk). The same general logic of global collaboration can be seen in the System for Rice Intensification, a global collaboration in which thousands of farmers around the world share their own agronomy innovations with each other, open-source style. It has improved rice yields four- and five-times over without chemicals or GMOs.

I haven’t touched on innovations in local government. Let me just quickly mention the ingenious uses of government procurement to help strengthen the local economy such as the pioneering work led by the Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland and more recently, in Preston, England. In Italy, dozens of cities are developing “public/commons partnerships,” also known as “co-city protocols.” These are systems through which city bureaucracies collaborate with neighborhoods and citizen groups, empowering people to meet their own needs more directly and on their own terms.

Lest I leave the impression that the commons amounts to a bunch of white papers and policy ideas, let me underscore that the commons is about providing convivial spaces for us as whole human beings. A commons can only work by drawing upon our inner lives, sense of purpose, and cultural and spiritual values. It is therefore imperative that artists and cultural organizations play a conspicuous role. They can express insights and feelings that our hyper-cognitive minds cannot. They can express embodied ways of knowing.

I think you can begin to connect the many dots. No single one of them is the answer, but together, they help us to begin to think like a commoner. That’s liberating. That opens up new vistas of possibility. It helps us fight the war against the imagination and give us hope.

In the 1980s, British Prime Minister Thatcher defended the harsh neoliberal agenda of privatization, deregulation, and fiscal austerity, with a line that was often shortened to its acronym, TINA: “There Is No Alternative!” she would thunder. In truth, as I hope I’ve shown, the more accurate acronym is TAPAS: “There Are Plenty of Alternatives!”

But these alternatives are only available to us if we can learn how to develop a new mindset, cultivate a new language to express our shared vision, and embark upon the hard work of building it out through commoning, project by project. That’s our challenge, which I am grateful to be able to share with this remarkable Prairie Festival!

Thank you.

The post The Insurgent Power of the Commons in the War Against the Imagination appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Abigail Savitch-Lew, City Limits: The community land trust movement is on the rise in cities across the country from Miami to Oakland, but as of late, the Big Apple arguably ranks among the cities where the movement is most energized. Across the five boroughs, where for the past 20 years there’s been one community land trust (CLT), there’s now over a dozen groups trying to create new CLTs.

“I don’t know anywhere that has this level of growing interest, both with grassroots and more established organizations,” says Melora Hiller of Grounded Solutions Network, which supports the CLT movement nationwide.

A CLT is a nonprofit entity that stewards the housing or other buildings on its property by retaining ownership of the land—a unique ownership structure that advocates say help ensure the buildings remain permanently affordable. The model is also believed to promote democratic and community-driven decision making, with CLTs usually governed by a “tripartite board,” in which one third of members are residents of the property itself, one third live in the surrounding neighborhood, and one third are other stakeholders like nonprofits, elected officials, or funders. The concept was originally conceived by Black farmers seeking to protect Black assets in the Jim Crow South but has in recent years become a strategy used in urban settings to help communities maintain affordable housing.

From a policy standpoint, 2017 was a victorious year for New York City’s CLT movement. It began with the de Blasio administration, after months of prodding by advocates, opening the door to the CLT vision by releasing a Request for Expressions of Interest, calling on groups to submit proposals detailing how they would develop and manage CLTs. In July, the de Blasio administration announced it had applied for grant funding from Enterprise Community Partners and had received $1.65 million for a variety of CLT projects.

This December, the City Council passed legislation officially codifying CLTs and allowing the city to enter into regulatory agreements with them. (The Council also passed two bills requiring the city to take stock of, and report on, vacant land as well as property owned by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD)—measures that advocates believe will shed light on what properties could be potentially steered onto CLTs.)

As the momentum behind CLTs has grown, some policymakers—and some advocates, too—have cautioned that CLTs are not the answer to all the city’s housing problems, but rather just one additional “tool in the toolbox” to help address those problems. “It doesn’t create a magical subsidy or some kind of substitution for a tax exemption or below-market financing,” says Erica Buckley, a lawyer at Nixon Peabody LLP.

The de Blasio administration has expressed a particular interest in the use of CLTs to fill a gap in its existing offerings when it comes to the creation of permanently affordable single-home ownership opportunities. When it comes to rental housing, some see CLTs as not as much a necessity: There are players in the city’s established nonprofit affordable housing sector that are already dedicated to building housing for very low incomes and simply seek more resources to do so, and the city already has recently come up with other solutions to ensure permanent affordability in rental projects on public land.

On the other hand, many advocates see CLTs as providing a greater social value that exceeds these more technical aspects, and they therefore dream of the CLT movement going big and acquiring significant amounts of land—while also working hand-in-hand with existing nonprofit affordable housing developers.

Yet an effective expansion of CLTs citywide will require more resources and more city buy-in than the movement has yet seen. There will also be some tough decisions down the line as the movement tries to balance the goal of speedy expansion with that of fostering real community involvement.

The reasons to expand

For many advocates, especially organizers rooted in communities, CLTs offer the promise of community control over land-use decisions during a time when many feel they have been left subject to the whims of real-estate interests that treat land and housing solely as a commodity. The governance style of CLTs means that there’s supposed to be more say from actual low-income people who live in such communities. CLTs thus might represent another opportunity for a neighborhood’s residents to advocate, and fight to secure, housing and amenities that are truly “affordable” by their own definition.

For some, CLTs represent another step toward a “broader vision of cooperative economics for New York City,” in the words of Deyanira Del Rio from the New Economy Project—a vision that includes worker cooperatives, community development credit unions, and other entities. It’s also sometimes referred to the “solidarity economy,” and New Economy Project describes it as “a vision for an economic system that is based on values of social and racial justice, ecological, sustainability, cooperation, mutualism, and democracy” and that gives “marginalized New Yorkers” control over their lives.

And then, from an economics perspective, there’s the notion that “if you remove enough land from a neighborhood—some geographic portion of a city, or of a city as a whole…there’s going to be fewer speculative opportunities and in making fewer speculative opportunities it also means that there are whole areas that are not being speculated on,” says City College professor John Krinksy. In other words, some advocates believe that a large CLT can deter land speculation and thereby slow gentrification.

Beyond the value of bringing the benefits of deep and permanent affordability to more people, achieving local control, expanding the cooperative movement, and taking more land off the speculative market, there are also practical benefits to scaling up the city’s CLTs: large organizations are more cost-effective and can access funding more easily.

Where are the CLTs?
Community land trusts at various stages of development in New York City. Click on a marker to view information about each CLT initiative.

Sizing up the potential

The largest community land trust in the country is the Champlain Housing Trust, formerly the Burlington Community Land Trust and Lake Champlain Housing Development Corporation, which were both founded in 1984 while Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington. In December 2016, it encompassed 2,703 units of housing, and was spread throughout both urban and rural areas. The Windham and Windsor Housing Trust in Southern Vermont ranked second with 1,061 units of housing, and, in Rhode Island, Newport’s Church Community Housing Corporation ranked third at 940 units, according to figures reported to the national support organization Grounded Solutions Network, which only has data on its member organizations.

In New York City, the only fully established community land trust is the Cooper Square CLT in the Lower East Side, which formed in 1994. The land is owned by the CLT while 21 buildings, compromising 328 apartments, are owned by an entity called a Mutual Housing Association, which is a multi-building self-governing cooperative that makes bulk purchases for all the buildings. Over time, most of the apartments were converted from rentals to low-income co-op units.

The organization was one of the recipients of the Enterprise Community Partners grant, which has allowed it to make some new hires and pay for some additional tenant organizing. Cooper Square now has its own visions of expansion: It’s discussing the acquisition of two Housing Development Fund Corporation (HDFC) buildings in the neighborhood, and it also has its eyes on a desanctified church that it believes could encompass 80 to 100 more units of housing.

“We want to expand because we want to be able to help out our neighbors in low-income housing that is threatened, but the second part of it has to do with the economies-of-scale piece, and that is, as you get more buildings and more apartments, you can purchase fuel at a deeper discount,” says Dave Powell, executive director of the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association.

There are dozens of other organizations seeking to follow Cooper Square’s lead. The New York City Community Land Initiative (NYCCLI), a CLT advocacy organization co-founded by Picture the Homeless, New Economy Project and other organizations, helped to launch the East Harlem-El Barrio Community Land Trust a few years ago. As City Limits earlier reported, the land trust sought to acquire not only vacant property but also to invite tenants in city-owned Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program buildings onto the land trust.

After several years of organizing, the De Blasio administration has agreed to turn over four buildings in the neighborhood to the CLT. The CLT received $500,000 from Enterprise, which it will use for both renovations and to hire an organizer, and $500,000 from City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito for renovations to the buildings, which will be executed by the non-profit affordable housing organizations Banana Kelly CIA Inc and CATCH. The city is exploring making additional budget commitments for rehabilitation, as well. Residents in those buildings will be renters and participants in a Mutual Housing Association.

Then there’s Interboro CLT—a newly formed collaboration between four well-established housing organizations: Habitat for Humanity New York City, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, the Mutual Housing Association of New York and Center for New York City Neighborhoods. The entity is focusing on the creation of permanently affordable homeownership opportunities throughout the city, likely with a starting focus on Southeast Queens and Central Brooklyn. Interboro received funding from Enterprise as well as $1 million from Citi Community Development last year to begin its first 250 units.

The Enterprise Grant also funded NYCCLI to run a “Learning Exchange” to help nine nonprofits and community groups learn more about what it would take to build a CLT. Some of those groups, like Northfield Community Local Development Corporation in Staten Island and CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities in Chinatown, are still in the earliest stages and have not yet named specific properties they hope to acquire.

Others are already at the point of naming addresses. The Mary Mitchell Family & Youth Center hopes to launch a Crotona CLT in the Bronx and has its eyes on three properties owned, respectively, by the city, itself and an ally. The Center’s vision includes a garden, community and nonprofit space and low-income housing, probably mostly rental units. The Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards in the South Bronx are trying to acquire two government-owned buildings for low-income rentals and nonprofit space, has already begun stewarding some state-owned green spaces along the Deegan Expressway, and envisions turning areas along the waterfront into community land trust greenspaces.

“We’re not developers, and we’re not trying to be developers. What we’re trying to do is create a situation where the community can really be a steward of space and then hire professionals to manage what’s on top of the ground,” says Mychal Johnson, a founder of Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards. On a citywide level, Johnson would like to see more NYCHA complexes turn land over to CLTs, so that decisions about the future of any NYCHA spaces can be made in tandem with residents and the community, rather than decided by the authority. In particular, stakeholders could explore opportunities to convert apartments in some NYCHA developments into affordable cooperative homeownership units on a CLT, he says.*

Another participant in the Learning Exchange, Community Solutions, envisions the creation of a Brownsville CLT including 91 HPD-owned vacant lots in the neighborhood that they believe could hold more than 1,000 units of both rental and homeownership housing. To start, they hope the CLT can acquire several vacant lots where the city is already seeking a developer as part of its efforts to fulfill the goals of its Brownsville Plan.

Given the scarcity of public land and the skyrocketing values of private property in most parts of the city, one might wonder if New York City may be getting on the CLT bandwagon too late. Some advocates, however, still hope that in the future, CLTs—especially those that are community-driven and provide deeply affordable housing—will encompass a significant mass of the city. Johnson says ideally he’d like to see at least 25 or 50 percent of the 300,000 units in the mayor’s affordable housing plan rest on a CLT. Lynn Lewis of the East Harlem-El Barrio CLT board and Del Rio similarly say their ideal vision would be hundreds of thousands of units throughout the city on a CLT.

There’s a long way to go to such a vision, but there’s already some ideas on the table about how to get to something the size of Burlington’s CLT. City Limits spoke to the city’s CLT groups about the number of units they envision could be built on specific properties they are currently seeking to acquire. Those projects add up to between 2,000 and 3,000 potential CLT units. The count does not include the potential units of groups in early stages, future units these groups may try to acquire, or units from any additional groups that did not speak with City Limits.

The ingredients for success

Asked what the Mott Haven-Port Morris CLT requires to succeed, Johnson says the biggest need is for funding to hire staff people to carry out day-to-day operations. “No one’s getting paid in our organization,” he says. Many other organizations trying to start CLT also spoke about the need for money to hire staff, legal counsel, and pay for community organizing and education, given that so many people still have never heard of a CLT. The funding from Enterprise has enabled some groups to hire organizers, but will only last a couple years.

New Economy Project’s Del Rio would like to see the City Council establish a funding program for CLTs as they did in 2014 for worker cooperatives and make annual appropriations. NYCCLI has in the past called for a housing trust fund underwritten by higher taxes on vacant and luxury properties. Matt Dunbar of Habitat NYC says they’re advocating for the state to put more money into the Affordable Home Ownership Development program, which funds the building and rehabilitation of affordable homeownership opportunities, and to mandate that all the program’s projects include resale restrictions to maintain permanent affordability.

Habitat NYC is also advocating for a state property tax exemption for community land trusts. This will serve as a back-up measure to the provision in the new City Council law that allows the city’s CLTs to obtain Article XI tax exemptions, and it will also help CLTs in other parts of the state.

It’s not just because Bernie Sanders was hanging out in Vermont that our northern neighbor has the nation’s two largest community land trusts. In 1987, the state passed the Vermont Housing and Conservation Trust Fund Act, which allocated funds from a property transfer tax to a trust fund to be used for conservation projects as well as affordable housing. The Act also mandated that any housing subsidized by Vermont be used for the creation of permanently affordable low-income housing built by nonprofit charities or CLTs. “If every city did that, it would make a huge difference,” says Hiller of Grounded Solutions Network.

Indeed, beyond just funding, advocates are pushing for policies that facilitate the transfer of city-owned, or distressed, privately owned land to CLTs, such as by prioritizing CLTs when seeking partners to develop public land.

“We would like all the city-owned properties in East Harlem to be taken off the table—and I’m talking vacant lots, I’m talking city-owned buildings, and, you know, buildings are continuously going into tax liens sales and TPT,” says Lewis, referring to the Third Party Transfer program, which transfers severely distressed buildings in tax foreclosure to new owners. She also mentions distressed low-income co-ops that could benefit from the cost-savings of joining a larger entity, and East Harlem’s many abandoned, boarded-up privately owned buildings. Lewis would like the city to come up with policies that help move all such properties to a CLT. (Boston’s famous CLT, Dudley Neighbors Incorporated, formed when the city gave a community organization the power to take property through eminent domain.)

But Lewis also recognizes that getting the city’s trust requires time and effort, and there’s some justification for that. “We don’t want a situation where anybody who walks up to HPD says I want this vacant plot, and they say ‘ok, here,’” she says, adding that she’s encouraged by signs of HPD’s growing interest in CLTs.

CLTs are currently welcomed to respond to RFPs but are not given special preference or priority. The city says it does, however, give preference for projects that offer extended affordability beyond the minimum regulatory period.

“We recognize that community-driven solutions are key to the progress of housing development and preservation. We believe [in] harnessing and nurturing these groups that are uniquely positioned to fill gaps in our robust programming,” wrote Juliet Morris, a spokesperson for HPD, in an e-mail.

The challenges of growth

Some tenant advocates emphasize that expanding CLTs shouldn’t be the only goal of the housing movement at the expense of all others. There are nonprofit affordable housing developers who hope that the excitement over CLTs doesn’t distract from their battle to ensure the nonprofit sector as a whole receives a larger share of the development pie—rather than create a situation where, as one developer puts, “non-profits and CLTs end up fighting for scraps while HPD continues to steer land, buildings, and funding to their for-profit partners.”

Others caution that CLTs by themselves may not be enough to bring displacement to a halt. Cooper Square may have protected low-income residents on a couple blocks in the Lower East Side, but that has not, of course, prevented the rest of that neighborhood from gentrifying.

“It’s a great moment. We’re very excited for the potential for this movement to grow and expand, but the other side of this is that the CLT piece is not a panacea, it’s one part of a larger movement that we’re part of,” says Powell. “If we don’t simultaneously insist that NYCHA housing is defended, and NYCHA residents are defended—if we don’t simultaneously insist that vacancy decontrol in rent-stabilized housing is abolished, then we win the battle but lose the war.”

There have been cases where the administration has touted investment in CLTs as part of a larger land use project that CLT advocates may or may not agree with. When the East Harlem rezoning was approved by the Council in November, the de Blasio administration and Mark-Viverito listed “fund and support the East Harlem-El Barrio Community Land Trust” as one of the investments the city would make in the neighborhood. Lewis says the CLT board actually took a stance against the rezoning, which, in her view, makes East Harlem “opened up like a piñata for developers to come in and snatch properties.” She’s now waiting to see to what degree the city actually supports the CLT going forward. “How can the CLT really be a ‘community benefit’? What does that really mean?” she says.

These concerns aside, there’s also the question of how to balance the CLT movement’s desire for scale with the goal of thorough community engagement. Given the rapid creep of gentrification into outer borough neighborhoods—and the urgency of the affordability crisis—it’s logical that some CLT advocates would want CLTs to establish themselves efficiently and acquire land as fast as possible.

“From the perspective of addressing a housing challenge…I would rather see 100 units be permanently affordable from a Habitat [for Humanity], versus five over 15 years from a community-based organization,” says Hiller.

But if CLTs are going to be truly community-based and community governed—not just another tool pushed forward by large, if benevolent nonprofits—they’ll require a level of careful community engagement that could take much longer.

Hiller adds that she deeply values community engagement and that ideally New York City’s CLT movement will create a structure that allows for both efficient expansion and grassroots connections. This might look like a “hub and spoke” system where there’s a central organization with development capacity that is connected to many neighborhood groups that are facilitating on-the-ground conversations, she says. Indeed, NYCCLI is actually in the early stages of exploring a citywide community land trust that would be able to provide administrative support, and acquire properties, on behalf of smaller groups that are rooted in neighborhoods.

If CLTs want to go big, they will ultimately grapple not only with the issue of securing resources and land, but also with how to establish their legitimacy while at the same time staying loyal to, as Del Rio says, the “C” in CLT.

“One thing that people really want to make sure is that scale doesn’t lead to a dilution of mission or connection to the community,” says Del Rio. “What are the mechanisms to ensure that CLTs really respond to and are led by community members?”

One CLT in Focus
The current and planned sites of Banana Kelly’s Community Land Trust.

*Amended to clarify Johnson’s vision.

Header image: Adi Talwar, A CLT in the East Village. 25 East 3rd Street flanked by 23 East and 27 East 3rd Street to the left and right respectively. The three buildings are a part of the Cooper Square Community Land Trust.

The post The NYC Community Land Trust Movement Wants to Go Big appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Thomas M. Hanna, Joe Guinan and Joe Bilsborough: There is no telling when the next UK general election will come, and when the Corbyn Project could accede to national political power in what R.H. Tawney once called ‘the oldest and toughest plutocracy in the world’. But there is still plenty of work to be done in the meantime. While there were some advances in last month’s local elections, the mixed results underscore the difficulty of mobilisation around a stale and sterile managerialist model of local government, as embodied in all too many Labour councils.

Austerity at the national level may have been eased, at least rhetorically, but a fiscal crisis of the local state still rages. Since 2010, government funding to local authority budgets has been slashed by 49.1 per cent, with more pain still to come; by 2020, cuts in central government funding are forecast to reach 56.3 per cent. Although plans for all councils to receive 100 per cent rates retention by 2019/2020 have been placed on ice, cuts premised on this change continue unabated. Almost half of all councils are set to lose all central government funding by 2019/2020, with a yawning £5.8bn funding gap opening up by the end of the decade. Even with the best will in the world—clearly lacking in places like Haringey, where until recently a ghoulish Blairite zombie local government politics still walked at night—this has not been a promising context in which to build political support for and project out a Corbyn-inflected ‘new economics’.

But difficulty need not be impossibility—as can be seen in the path taken by the flagship Labour council of Preston in Lancashire. In a few short years Preston has gone from being one of the most deprived parts of the country to a model of radical innovation in local government through its embrace of community wealth building as a modern reinvention of the longstanding political tradition of municipal socialism. Community wealth building is a local economic development strategy focused on building collaborative, inclusive, sustainable, and democratically controlled local economies. Instead of traditional economic development through public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives, which waste billions to subsidize the extraction of profits by footloose corporations with no loyalty to local communities, community wealth building supports democratic collective ownership of—and participation in—the economy through a range of institutional forms and initiatives. These include worker co-operatives, community land trusts, community development finance institutions, so-called ‘anchor’ procurement strategies, municipal and local public enterprise, participatory planning and budgeting, and—increasingly, it is to be hoped—public banking. Community wealth building is economic system change, but starting at the local level.

The term first emerged in the United States in 2005, and was coined by our colleagues at The Democracy Collaborative. It was used to describe the model then beginning to emerge in the severely disinvested inner-city neighbourhoods of some of America’s larger cities as a response to crisis and austerity. As federal and state fiscal transfers dried up, social pain intensified in communities that had long been suffering from high levels of unemployment and poverty. Precisely because large public expenditures for jobs and housing were seen to be no longer politically achievable, more and more people started turning to economic alternatives in which new wealth could be built collectively and from the bottom up.

There are now two flagship models of community wealth building—and a growing number of additional efforts in cities across the United States and United Kingdom.  The first model is the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio—created, in part, by our own organisation, The Democracy Collaborative. Cleveland had lost almost half of its population and most of its large publicly-traded companies due to deindustrialisation, disinvestment, and capital flight. But it still had very large non-profit and quasi-public institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, and University Hospitals—known as anchor institutions because they are rooted in place and aren’t likely to up and leave. Together, Cleveland’s anchors were spending around $3 billion per year, very little of which was previously staying in the local community. The Democracy Collaborative worked with them to localise a portion of their procurement in support of a network of purposely-created green worker co-ops, the Evergreen Co-operatives, tied together in a community corporation so that they too are rooted in place. Today these companies are profitable and are beginning to eat the lunch of the multinational corporations that had previously provided contract services to the big anchors. Last month came the announcement of an expansion of the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry to a new site serving the needs of the Cleveland Clinic, with a hundred new employees on fast track to worker ownership.

The ‘Cleveland Model’ is one of the sources of inspiration for Preston, now the pre-eminent example of community wealth building approaches in the UK. Back in 2012, Evergreen caught the attention of Labour councillor Matthew Brown, now a colleague at The Democracy Collaborative. With the help of others, such as Neil McInroy at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), Brown took the Cleveland Model and radically expanded it. The ‘Preston Model’ now encompasses a string of public sector anchors across Preston and Lancashire, to which has been added public pension fund investment, affordable housing, and—hopefully, in the near future—an energy company and a community bank.

A longstanding tradition

Both the Cleveland and Preston Models represent a reinvention of a longstanding political tradition that played a significant role in the development of mass socialist politics in Europe and North America—and could now do so again, just when such a politics is most needed. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, activists on both sides of the Atlantic began to articulate a sophisticated political-economic theory of change. They suggested that by advancing a radical yet popular economic strategy of democratised ownership, good governance, and better working conditions at the local level, they could begin to build political power from the ground up. “Little by little the conditions of the people are to be improved”, Carl Thompson, a Wisconsin State Legislator and one of the United States’ leading municipal socialists, argued in 1907. “[T]hus, in every way, society will be gradually prepared for and led into the experience of Social-Democracy” (Thompson, 1908, 28). Similarly, in Britain in 1919, the Russian émigré and radical journalist Theo Rothstein asserted that local councils should be transformed “into so many forts from which to assail the Capitalist order” (Rothstein, 1919).

Municipal socialists believed that by pursuing policies and conducting campaigns around economic issues that directly affected the community, they could build durable political coalitions, raise the aspirations and political awareness of ordinary working people, and develop the political and administrative skills for further social and economic transformation (Judd, 1989; Stave, 1975). This coupling of consciousness-raising with the marked material enrichment of everyday life could then be deployed to the furtherance of socialism more broadly—in local, state, and national elections.

Image: The Democracy Collaborative, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In the UK, interest in the economic and political possibilities of municipal socialism came and went with the rising and ebbing of the tides of economic reform and mass politics. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was led by early Fabian thinkers, with six Fabians—among them Sidney Webb—being elected to the London County Council in the 1892 elections. Of the first hundred Fabian tracts, written between 1884 and 1900, some forty-three discussed issues of local government (Chandler, 2007, 130-131). In What About The Rates?, Webb’s 1913 treatise on the financial autonomy of the municipalities, he protested vociferously against a political strategy which sought to marginalise the municipal: “Let us leave such proposals to the enemy … We, as Socialists, much cherish local government, and aim always at its expansion, not its contraction” (Webb, 1913, 9-10).

Municipal socialism was thus conceptualised as a consciously-evolving process, simultaneously shifting ownership—and with it power—whilst raising local living standards. Economic and political successes were consciously built upon to expand the strategy both horizontally (to other municipalities and industries) and vertically (to larger enterprises and services, and higher levels of governance). F. Lawson Dodd demonstrated the unfolding logic of this approach in a 1905 tract, arguing that the merits of water municipalisation warranted a further municipalisation of the milk supply on the bases of both power and public health: “The establishment of municipal milk depots supplied from municipal farms is the first step towards the social organisation of the dairy industry … The community would take over the whole of the supply”, he argued (Lawson Dodd, 1905, 17). The full extent of the impressive economic footprint achieved by municipal ownership in late-nineteenth-century Britain is nicely captured in the account given by Webb in his 1890 book Socialism in England:

“The ‘practical man,’ oblivious or contemptuous of any theory of the Social Organism or general principles of social organisation, has been forced by the necessities of the time into an ever deepening collectivist channel. Socialism, of course, he still rejects and despises. The Individualist Town Councillor will walk along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with the municipal water, and seeing by the municipal clock in the municipal market, that he is too early to meet his children coming from the municipal school hard by the county lunatic asylum and municipal hospital, will use the national telegraph system to tell them not to walk through the municipal park but to come to the municipal tramway, to meet him in the municipal reading room, by the municipal art gallery, museum and library, where he intends … to prepare his next speech in the municipal town hall, in favour of the nationalisation of the canals and the increase of government control over the railway system. ‘Socialism, sir,’ he will say, ‘don’t waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, sir, individual self-help, that’s what’s made our city what it is’” (Webb, 1890, 65)

Tensions soon arose, however, between local and national aspirations. With the rise of Labour as an electorally successful national party committed to a top-down reorganisation of the British economy, municipal socialism began to wither. This was partly the party’s own doing, with one of the deleterious consequences of the centralising tendencies of Attlee’s post-1945 nationalisation programme being the abandonment and erasure of the rich tapestry of local traditions of municipal ownership, mutualism, and co-operation. The boards of the newly nationalised (and centralised) public companies were comprised of a curious assemblage of the contemporary elite, which often meant that the extensive tacit knowledge of the workers and successful economic practices of municipal enterprises were marginalised, ignored, or lost altogether. Knights, Lords, and generals were well represented on these boards (Jenkins, 1959, 16), but—to take but one example—not a single member of the fourteen appointees to the board of the first Gas Council had been connected with any of the numerous previous municipally owned public gasworks (Kelf-Cohen, 1973, 59).

Only with the sunset of the top-down Keynesian economic management of the postwar Golden Age did municipal socialism begin to re-emerge as a political force. In the dark days of Thatcherism, radical local experiments re-appeared in the shape of the Greater London Council (GLC) and other metropolitan councils. As Stuart Hall wrote, the GLC “operated right across the spectrum, politicising sites of daily life and drawing them into the orbit of politics in ways unthinkable to most conventional Labour councils” (Hall, 1988, 237). Thatcher, perhaps more than anyone, immediately saw the political danger inherent in any significant revival of municipal socialism—especially one with a strong participatory, democratic character. “The GLC represents modern socialism”, the arch-Thatcherite Norman Tebbit stated, concluding that ‘we must kill it’ (Wainwright, 2003, 8).

Many of Thatcher’s own colleagues were made somewhat uneasy by “her deep-seated and almost obsessive objections to urban socialists” (Kösecik and Kapucu, 2003, 87), whilst the municipal socialist and Labour MP for Manchester Central, Bob Litherland, wondered aloud in Parliament as to whether it might be deemed “unfair that the metropolitan counties have to suffer because a Prime Minister takes a paranoic view of Ken Livingstone and thinks that he is immortal” (HC Deb 11 April 1984). George Tremlett, a Conservative councillor on the GLC and outspoken critic of Thatcher’s abolition agenda, was dropped from the Conservative Group altogether after arguing that “the proposals were so outrageous and so contrary to all the Conservative traditions of government that they must call into question Mrs. Thatcher’s capacity to form a balanced judgement on important issues of public policy”, and eventually encouraging Conservatives to vote Labour in the 1984 by-elections (Kösecik and Kapucu, 2003, 77).

Despite this opposition, Thatcher persisted in her determination to abolish the GLC, which was accomplished with the Local Government Act of 1985, wherby these resurgent experiments in municipal socialism were legislated out of existence. With Thatcher’s defenestration of local government, municipal socialism once again faded from the picture politically in Britain. Recent plans to devolve power to local government have been a mixture of unintelligibility and—especially since 2010—cynical exercises in political buck-passing, particularly attempts to shift the blame for implementing austerity. As a consequence, the public has quite rightly reacted negatively to such efforts, as well as other associated attempts to address the overwhelming centralisation of Britain’s political economy and governance. Referenda on regional assemblies in England advanced by Tony Blair were soundly rejected—by as much as 78 per cent in the vote on devolution to North East England in 2004—while George Osborne’s lopsided localism agenda has been plunged into legislative formaldehyde with the arrival of Theresa May in Downing Street.

Municipal socialism revisited

In the modern era of 24-7 news cycles and horserace political coverage, local politics rarely receives much attention. When local campaigns and politics are covered at all, it is usually because such elections are deemed to be a bellwether for the relative national political strength of the parties. This downgrading of local politics also extends to political analysts and activists, and often even to the political parties themselves, as can be seen in their reluctance to invest precious resources in local campaigns.

There are promising signs, however, that this is now beginning to change. With the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, municipal socialism has once again returned to the Labour Party’s agenda in a powerful way. “With amazing creativity in the toughest of times, we are seeing the first shoots of the renaissance of local government for the many, not the few—the rebirth of municipal socialism”, Corbyn proclaimed in February of this year.

As indicated above, one of the leading models of re-emerging, modern-day municipal socialism in the UK is to be found in Preston. In 2011, the city—which had been declining economically since the 1970s—was reeling from a bitter double blow. Central government funding was plummeting under the austerity regime of Cameron’s coalition government and long held revitalization plans based on a £700 million shopping centre had collapsed. The newly-elected Labour council realized that they needed to come up with a new strategy. It was then that Councillor Matthew Brown, Cabinet Member for Social Justice, Inclusion, and Policy, stepped forward with his ideas. Inspired by alternative forms of economic development around the world, including the Mondragón cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain and the Evergreen Co-operatives in Cleveland, Ohio, Brown and his fellow councillors began to develop plans to deploy Preston’s existing assets and financial clout to catalyse a new local economic model that builds wealth rather than extracts it from the community. Working with the Manchester-based CLES, Preston Council approached the large anchor institutions in the area and came up with a strategy to shift as much of their spending and procurement back into the local economy as possible. In 2013, six of the local institutions that signed up for the effort spent around £38m in Preston and £292m in Lancashire as a whole. By 2017 this had skyrocketed to £111m and £486m respectively. The new localized contracts cover everything from school lunches to large-scale construction projects. Moreover, contracts shifted locally have a multiplier effect, as pounds circulate and recirculate throughout the local economy, creating jobs which in turn lead to more spending on goods and services, which then leads to the creation of more jobs, and so on.

The Preston Model, however, is about much more than just developing the local economy through shifts in spending and procurement. It is about alternative forms of ownership that not only enrich the lives and livelihoods of residents and workers, but also give them the opportunity to actively participate in the economic decisions that affect their lives and the future of their city. Even before working with the anchor institutions, Preston Council backed plans to develop co-operatives (and link them to the procurement needs of the anchors) and a public financial institution (see Chakrabortty, 2018; Sheffield, 2017; Singer, 2016).

Preston has been lauded by the Labour leadership and by sections of the media as an example of what could be achieved—albeit on a far greater scale—nationally under a Corbyn-led government. “This kind of radicalism”, argued John McDonnell in a 2016 speech at the Preston-based, worker-owned transport company TAS, “is exactly what we need across the whole country”.

Star Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty kicked off his excellent new series exploring real-world economic alternatives with an in-depth study of the Preston Model, following on the heels of a broadly sympathetic write-up in The Economist, which dubbed Preston ‘Corbyn’s model town’. In a speech to the Co-operative Party, Corbyn himself praised the “inspiring innovation” of developments in Preston, particularly when set against the wider backdrop of swinging cuts to local government funding.

Preston also demonstrates the renewed potential of modern municipal socialism as a political strategy. As was the case a century ago, advancing a radical and innovative program of local economic regeneration can quickly lead to tangible political benefits. In the May 2018 local council elections, the Preston Labour Party pledged (among other things) to increase investment and jobs based on the Preston Model; to create a public bank and local wealth fund; to support the creation of new worker cooperatives; and to ask the Lancashire Pension Fund to invest more in the local economy (Preston Labour, 2018). The voters responded, as Labour increased its majority on the local council by picking up two seats—College Ward and Garrison Ward—that had long been controlled by the Tories. Moreover, as new councillor for College Ward Freddie Bailey explained to local journalists, “what we found helped was the Preston Model” (Farnworth, 2018). This was reinforced in the wake of the election when Matthew Brown was elevated to become Leader of Preston City Council.

Onwards to municipal socialism!

While it is right to remain cognisant of the limitations placed on local government by colossal cuts and decades of restrictive legislation, the twin temptations of fatalism—that nothing can be done—and deferral—that nothing can be done until Labour is in power in Westminster—must be roundly rejected. As Preston today demonstrates, a new radical municipalism can indeed emerge in Britain (as it is doing all across the world in the face of neoliberal crisis and austerity) and can serve as the basis for potentially much further reaching national and international change. Exorcising the zombie councils who do little besides implement austerity is vital, but so is creatively, confidently, and collaboratively exercising the significant powers councils do still possess.

As Daniel Frost recently urged in New Socialist, and as we have argued previously, there is much that can be done already—as a movement we need not wait for Labour to gain power nationally before we begin advancing ambitious programmes around a ‘new economics’ based on radical modern reinventions of municipal socialism.

Working with and for the local community to invigorate popular participation in economic decision-making and create—rather than merely extract—community wealth represents both an electorally and an economically successful strategy that can be implemented by councils across the country. The manner in which Preston has caught the imagination as a laboratory of ‘Corbynomics’ points to the wider role such approaches can play, not just in delivering for their local communities (vitally important though that is, the foundation of all else that follows) but also in helping us all to imagine, experience, and get involved with systemic economic transformation.

In an earlier period of economic contraction and difficulty in Lancashire, none other than Karl Marx wrote, in the New York Herald Tribune, of the emerging workers’ movement in the region: “The eyes of the working classes are now fully opened, they begin to cry: Our St. Petersburg is at Preston!”

Today, anyone looking around, from Capita to Carillion to the grim shadow of Grenfell Tower and the travails of East Coast Mainline, can see the existing neoliberal economic model failing and collapsing. But what holds a system in place, often, is a failure of imagination that things can fundamentally change, and that there are real, viable alternatives for organising a next system. Part of the answer to our failing economic system lies in on-the-ground experimentation and model building that embraces the design and principles of a new systemic alternative.

There is precedent for this. In the political science literature in the United States, it is known as the ‘laboratories of democracy’. In Britain, when Nye Bevan launched the NHS in 1948, he drew as inspiration from the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, a community-based model in South Wales that began in 1890. This small Welsh experiment was then scaled up into one of the world’s truly great public health systems.

We now have an opportunity—in the unknown amount of time between now and the next UK General Election—to get people familiar with the elements of the democratic economy through a widespread embrace of community wealth building approaches by Labour councils and local authorities. This suggests the potential basis for a new institutional underpinning for socialist politics, building support for our new economics from the ground up in a way that is far less scary and more comprehensible in a local context than it can sometimes appear at the national level. Our ambition, as the Corbyn Project, should be to bring about what Tony Benn termed “a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. Community wealth building is what that looks like when you start at the local level and begin creating systemic economic change from the ground up.

***

References

Chakrabortty, A. (2018) ‘In 2011 Preston hit rock bottom. Then it took back control’, The Guardian, 31.01.2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/preston-hit-rock-bottom-took-back-control

Chandler, J. A. (2007) Explaining local government: Local government in Britain since 1800.Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Farnworth, A. (2018) ‘Labour turns two parts of Fulwood red with local election wins’, Blog Preston, 04.05.2018, http://www.blogpreston.co.uk/2018/05/labour-turns-two-parts-of-fulwood-red-with-local-election-wins/

Hall, Stuart. (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left.London: Verso.

HC Deb (11 April 1984) Vol. 58, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1984/apr/11/local-government-interim-provisions-bill#S6CV0058P0_19840411_HOC_413

Jenkins, C. (1959) Power at the top: A Critical Survey of the Nationalized Industries. London: MacGibbon and Kee.

Judd, R. (1989) Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kelf-Cohen, R. (1973) British Nationalisation 1945-1973. London: The Macmillan Press.

Kösecik, M., and Kapucu, N. (2003) ‘Conservative Reform of Metropolitan Counties: Abolition of the GLC and MCCs in Retrospect’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 71-94.

Lawson Dodd, F. (1905) Municipal Milk and Public Health. London: The Fabian Society.

Preston Labour. (2018) ‘Preston Labour Manifesto 2018 City Council Elections’, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b14b61_3f842b96c215443cac627887a71a18d7.pdf

 Rothstein, T. (1919) ‘A Revolutionary Municipal Policy’, The Call, 27.11.1919, https://www.marxists.org/archive/rothstein/1919/11/27.htm

Sheffield, H. (2017) ‘The Preston model: UK takes lessons in recovery from rust-belt Cleveland’, The Guardian, 11.04.2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/apr/11/preston-cleveland-model-lessons-recovery-rust-belt

Singer, C. (2016) ‘The Preston Model’, The Next System Project, 09.09.2016, https://thenextsystem.org/the-preston-model

Stave, B. (ed.) (1975) Socialism and the Cities. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat.

 Thompson, C. (1908) The Constructive Program of Socialism. Milwaukee: Social-Democratic Publishing Co.

 Wainwright, H. (2003) Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy. London: Verso.

 Webb, S. (1889) Socialism in England. Baltimore: American Economic Association.

Webb, S. (1913) What about the rates?: or, Municipal finance and municipal autonomy. London: The Fabian Society.

Photo by drinksmachine

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One of these activists was Robert Swann, co-author of The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America. In the book he explained that, “Israel has been one of the few countries in the world to be successful in preventing the process of uprooting the poor tenant farmer from taking place. The leasehold system has brought security of land tenure to the small farmer and his family and has prevented the control of land by absentee landlords, speculation in land, and the exploitation of farmworkers by a landowning class.”

After learning about the mechanics of a system that had demonstrably protected communities against these unwanted outcomes, Swann and other members of this group, such as the Albany Movement and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Slater King and Charles Sherrod, put their knowledge into practice. They would go on to form the first Community Land Trust (CLT) in the Southern US state of Georgia.

ABOVE: Robert Swann and Charles Sherrod with members of New Communities, Inc. at planning meeting circa 1970

Less than one year after the trip to Israel, New Communities Inc. was registered as a farming co-operative and CLT. It was created as a direct response to the political disenfranchisement and vicious economic retaliation faced by Black communities, with the understanding that banding together and sharing ownership of the land would enable these communities to be more resilient and secure their land more effectively. In the following years, New Communities acquired 5,735 acres of land – 3,000 of which was cultivated farmland. At the time in the late 1960s this was the largest tract of land held by African Americans.

CLTs are legal models that separate the ownership of the land itself from the ownership of anything built (or growing) on the land. Importantly, CLTs effectively remove land from the market and, by democratising decision making and offering leases, ensure that the land is used for purposes that serve the surrounding community. New Communities did exactly this by offering leases that allowed farmers and homesteaders to use and manage the land communally.

New Communities operated for a decade and a half, but by the 1980s they were facing the impacts of drought, mounting debt, and racial discrimination. This prevented the acquisition of emergency loans from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and New Communities had to reluctantly sell its land and farms.

Although slavery officially ended in the US in the mid-1860s, it persisted for well over a century after. Once sharecropping was phased out, many white landowners often retaliated and did everything in their power to prevent African Americans from acquiring and retaining land, even pressuring federal agencies like the USDA to deny resources to Black farmers. In fact, the USDA had to pay $13M in 2010 to members of New Communities after losing a class action lawsuit, in which is was ascertained that there had been widespread racial discrimination with regard to loans for African American farmers.

Yet New Communities was not a failure, but rather a seminal experiment in community economics – one which has been learned from and replicated in various ways by hundreds of CLTs across the US and around the world. Mtamanika Youngblood, an early member of this movement, explained that New Communities took “civil rights one step further into economic independence and economic rights, using agriculture as an economic base.” What was significant was their understanding of the interplay between land, finance, and agriculture.

For a community to be resilient against external shocks and capable of directing its own development, it must be able to allocate sufficient resources to the efforts it sees as critical. This not only necessitates a stable system of land ownership and egalitarian land usage – such as the CLT model – but it also requires consistency and risk-management around agricultural production, in addition to a mechanism or set of mechanisms that allow a community to self-finance its own projects.

It’s no coincidence that experiments in community finance and local currency are often linked to agricultural production – think of the grain banks of Ancient Egypt. Agricultural activity directly produces commodities of value in the form of food and materials, but it requires the ability to pay in advance for seeds, equipment, land, and labour.

Since crops are subject to unpredictable external factors like weather, agriculture carries inherent risk. For a financial system that perceives each loan or investment as isolated, loans that increase food security and the overall health of a local economy are neglected or seen as high risk.

Jim Golden and his draft horses Spike and Rosie. His SHARE loan was to complete a barn for the team.

This is where community finance can play a role. Just as organisations like Kiva, a peer-to-peer microlending platform, enable businesses to take out low or no-interest loans guaranteed by their peers today, the SHARE (Self-Help Association for a Regional Economy) programme enabled community finance during a time of historically high interest rates. From 1981 to 1992, the SHARE programme enabled residents of the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts to collateralise loans to local business – businesses which would otherwise be rejected for bank loans. At the time, the US Federal Reserve had dramatically increased interest rates to fight rampant inflation. By the summer of 1981, interest rates on business loans was sometimes as high as 20%, yet the share programme enabled small businesses to take out loans at half that rate from their own community.

SHARE’s innovation in community finance continued to be successful and, among other programmes, advised two farms in the region to issue a scrip currency. One of the local farms needed funds to heat their greenhouses during the winter when cash was short; the other needed to repair and recover from fire damage. These farms sold what were called Berkshire Farm Preserve Notes for $9 during the winter. Once the harvest came, they accepted the notes back for $10, effectively giving a 10% discount to customers who pre-purchased farm produce.

Robin Van En (center) and other Indian Line members by Clemens Kalischer.

Yet viewed from the other side, this can be understood as a safe 10% return on investment – paid in farm produce – to those who invested in local agriculture. Analysing this further, this type of scrip currency can be seen as a grassroots financing scheme, one not dissimilar from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model.

Under the CSA model, all risks and rewards are shared with the community rather than absorbed by the farmers alone. Community members finance the operations of a CSA farm by pre-paying for CSA shares – a claim to a portion of the farm’s produce in the upcoming season. During a good year, community members with CSA shares receive high-quality produce below market prices; during a bad year, the financial impacts of the bad harvest are absorbed by the community. Importantly, the community reaps long-term benefits regardless of what happens. By smoothing out a farm’s income and insulating it from market shocks and external risk, the community ensures its own access to nutritional food.

In the same spirit, local currencies can and have given communities the tools to self-finance in times and places when the existing financial system cannot or will not do so. Local currencies serve multiple purposes and, depending on how individual currency programs are designed, each will serve some purposes better than others. It is important not to think of local currencies only as incentive systems that increase regional spending; local currencies can also be democratic systems of finance, tailored to the specific needs of the communities they exist in. These systems can (and already do) extend community credit to efforts which would otherwise not receive loans or funding.

The problem of accessing large-scale investment becomes less and less an issue as a regional currency achieves greater adoption. The Sardex currency system in Sardinia, Italy has been receiving a lot of press recently, and currently clears over €8 million in mutual credit payments between business each month. Another mutual credit system, the WIR in Switzerland, provides the means of over 1.5 billion Swiss francs per year and has been growing since 1934 when it was started to address a lack of access to credit. In Kenya, the Sarafu-Credit programmes operated by Grassroots Economics are also mutual credit systems, and they provide microfinance zero-interest loans in local currency to businesses and vendors who would otherwise have no access to credit.

Sharing a common thread with crowdfunding, lending circles, and even investment through credit unions and public banks, local currencies tap into the latent potential for communities to finance their own development. Just like these other community finance initiatives, any profits generated by endogenous financing from local currencies continue to enrich in the region.

Unassumingly nestled at the bottom of a sleepy hill in South Egremont (also in the Berkshires region), Indian Line Farm exists as an example of what the intersection of land, finance, and agriculture could look like in the new economy. Not only was it the first CSA farm in the United States, but Indian Line accepts the BerkShares regional currency as payment. BerkShares was started in 2006 by the same community that initiated the share programme and Berkshire Farm Preserve Notes, and still circulates today.

BerkShares local currency.

If that weren’t enough, Indian Line Farm also sits on CLT land and the lease requires that land to always be used for farming – it can never be used for any other purpose. In an innovation rare among existing CLTs, the farmers at Indian Line are not only entitled to equity derived from value they add to buildings on the land, but also from the value of perennial stock and organic soil improvements. By including this in the lease, the CLT ensures that the farmers’ economic incentives will always remain in alignment with the long-term environmental goals of the community.

Most often, when CLTs are mentioned in the media, it is in relation to low-income housing. This is because CLTs dealing with affordable housing or neighbourhood restoration have tax exempt status under US federal law. Yet there is nothing that actually requires a community land trust to be used for low-income housing.
In fact it is possible for all types of land to be held by CLTs, and it is also possible for equity to be given to individuals living and working on any type of CLT land.

Though a tax-exempt CLT cannot offer equity to individuals, it can use a two-tier framework to do so, where a subsidiary holding company manages the land and offers equity to those who live and work on it. This framework -commonly used by churches and educational institutions – was developed and acted upon by the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires that holds Indian Line Farm’s land.

(in photo from left to right: Bob Swann, Ursula Cliff, Susan Witt, Frank Lowenstein, Clemens Kalisher, Elizabeth Keen and Al Thorp celebrate the 1999 partnership formed in order to transfer ownership of Indian Line Farm from the estate of Robyn Van En. Photo by Clemens Kalischer.)

This framework allows all types of land to be donated, including land used for commercial purposes, and business owners or other leaseholders are entitled to equity in improvements made to businesses or anything else built on CLT land. As far as land reform goes, this innovation is truly groundbreaking in the way it enables most types of land to be held securely in common.

These three elements – land, agriculture, and finance – fundamentally influence the wealth flows and power dynamics that permeate society and shape it. By using and improving existing models, communities can build a resilient foundation where decommodified land is held in trust, the risks of agriculture are socialised, and regions maximise their ability to self-finance. With a foundation this solid, a community would be primed and equipped to direct its own development in any way it sees fit.

Aaron Fernando is a community currency consultant who has worked with multiple community currencies across the United States, and is also a writer focusing on local movements, new economy initiatives, and behavioural economics.

Lead image Indian Line Farm, by Jason Houston.

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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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Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are nonprofit organizations that acquire land with the goal of creating permanently affordable housing. There are various regional CLTs whose purpose is to acquire land for low-income residents, and keep it out of the speculative market indefinitely. These CLTs would be able to do their job more effectively, however, if there were adequate funding sources and legal mechanisms to enable them to compete with private developers. As it is now, few private banks are willing to offer loans to housing cooperatives and other CLT projects. California law entitles nonprofits to intervene on tax-defaulted properties after five years of delinquency and before a private developer is given the opportunity to bid (CAL. REV. & TAX. CODE § 3791.4), but this law is rarely enforced. In a world where the poor, elderly, and disabled are being thrown to the streets without relocation fees because of loopholes in rent control laws (such as Costa Hawkins and the Golden Duplex Rule), CLTs must be adequately funded so that they can intervene when property becomes available.

In San Francisco, supportive legislation called the Small Sites Acquisition Fund was recently passed to help enable nonprofit developers to acquire properties before tenants are evicted through the Ellis Act. But the amount allocated by the fund per unit is still not enough to keep the property affordable to low-income tenants. Many CLTs are stuck waiting for land to be donated or sold to them below market rate in order to accomplish their mission.

Other housing models in the Bay have also challenged the status quo of property ownership. The Sustainable Economies Law Center and the People of Color Sustainable Housing Network have teamed up to create the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EBPREC), which combines features of CLTs, limited equity housing cooperatives, and self-organizing social movements. In addition to residents, members of EBPREC will include neighbors who want to support the initiative by investing what they are able (up to $1000) to empower the community to take ownership of their neighborhoods. Although this model has a broad base of support in its incipient phase, start-up funding is still necessary to acquire land and begin its first project.

Many private banks and lending institutions hesitate to fund projects that benefit local communities because they determine that it is too risky, or not profitable enough. The federal statute, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), was supposed to require banks to address the needs of low and moderate income communities where they do business. The CRA is currently under attack by the Trump Administration, and even without changes in the law, there is still inadequate oversight to require banks to live up to this standard. At least 97% of banks receive outstanding or satisfactory ratings under CRA standards, despite evidence that many have engaged in discriminatory practices, including but not limited to the predatory lending that took place during the 2008 foreclosure crisis. There are examples of banks doing the right thing, however. For example, OneUnited Bank in Boston created a loan fund specifically for Community Land Trusts. More banks must follow their example to invest in the communities and projects that need capital the most.

Instead of waiting for more banks to do the right thing though, we must take matters of capital investment into our own hands. Public banks have been proposed in the cities of Oakland and San Francisco. We must demand not only that they are created, and that these banking institutions refrain from investing in pipelines, prisons, and other destructive institutions, but also that these banks invest in enterprises and organizations that benefit the community directly, and that they be governed by the community, with adequate oversight that they stay true to their mission. (See this essay by the Defenders of Mother Earth – Huichin coalition for a discussion of how to create accountability over public banks.) The creation of permanently affordable and community controlled housing, the kind created by CLTs and the PREC model, must be prioritized and funded to benefit local residents at risk of being displaced.

Here are a number of ways you can get involved:

• Sign up to be a community stakeholder with the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative! http://ebprec.org/community-stakeholder-pledge

• Donate to preserve another permanently affordable housing project in Oakland! https://www.crowdrise.com/newton-house-collective

• Support the creation of a public bank in Oakland! https://friendsofpublicbankofoakland.org/

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Aaron Fernando: The concept of ownership is a social contract that allows certain individuals and groups to have rights to certain resources or items while excluding others from that access. Under the mainstream conception of private property, both the ownership of land and anything built on top of it are combined into one. This bundling of land and buildings is often problematic — it puts neighborhoods and residents of cities in an unnecessarily precarious position by making them subject to the whims of land speculators.

This form of land ownership also prices out locals from areas that they historically lived and worked in by increasing costs — catalyzing the process of gentrification. It also privatizes and encloses common spaces and areas that previously benefitted surrounding communities, ultimately leading to a more fragmented society, one required to focus on uownsustainable short-term profits. All this holds true as long as land remains on the market.

Yet what we see today is a resurgence and re-invention of ownership models that allow communities to take care of themselves and steward their own natural resources. The Community Land Trust (CLT) model is one that reduces the socially-destructive effects of market forces by separating the ownership of land with the ownership of any property and equity atop the land itself.

Affordable housing-related CLTs are probably best-known, but this model can be applied for any community goal, including lowering costs for small businesses and ensuring local food production. Though the CLT model has been re-emerging since the late 1960s, it is actually somewhat of a return to indigenous practices around ownership of land and resources.

Winona LaDuke, anti-pipeline activist, water protector, and member of the Ojibwe nation spoke about this during the 1993 Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures. “Our traditional forms of land use and ownership are similar to those of a community land trust,” LaDuke said. “The land is owned collectively, and we have individual or, more often, family-based usufruct rights: each family has traditional areas where it fishes and hunts.”

Typically, a community land trust works by having a nonprofit (the community land trust’s legal entity) own the land and lease its long-term use to individuals — usually for 98 years. These leaseholders own anything that sits on top of the land, so if they make any improvements to their houses or other buildings, when they sell their buildings they can recover the buildings’ equity.

There is a fitting circularity at the root of LaDuke’s statements, because these lectures are hosted by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (where I work and where LaDuke will again be speaking), a nonprofit co-founded by Bob Swann, who was also one of the pioneers of the first community land trust in the United States.

The Indian Line Farm. Photo courtesy of Amelia Holmes/Schumacher Center for New Economics

Another CLT started by Bob Swann in the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts has put in place an additional innovation to ensure sustainable land stewardship. The Indian Line Farm gives farmers equity in not just their buildings, but the soil itself. A soil sample was taken at the start of the lease and another will be taken if farmers decide to move away. The farmers are entitled to the equity generated by any organic improvements to the soil on the land, in addition to improvements on the buildings.

On a deeper level, this leads to the question of whether natural resources can be owned at all. “In our language the words Anishinaabeg akiing describe the concept of land ownership. They translate as ‘the land of the people,’ which doesn’t imply that we own our land but that we belong on it,” LaDuke said.

As LaDuke explained, for the Ojibwe land and resources are managed as a commons.

“We have ‘hunting bosses’ and ‘rice chiefs,’ who make sure that resources are used sustainably in each region,” LaDuke said. “Hunting bosses oversee trap-line rotation, a system by which people trap in an area for two years and then move to a different area to let the land rest. Rice chiefs coordinate wild rice harvesting. The rice on each lake is unique: each has its own taste and ripens at its own time. We also have a ‘tallyman,’ who makes sure there are enough animals for each family in a given area. If a family can’t sustain itself, the tallyman moves them to a new place where animals are more plentiful. These practices are sustainable.”

If this sounds familiar, it may be because Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for analyzing and popularizing these ideas, debunking the belief that a tragedy of the commons was inevitable without government intervention. Ostrom was awarded the prize “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons” after she looked into the practices of natural resource management of groups like the Ojibwe, who had been managing their resources sustainably for centuries.

As new economy movements and sharing projects gain traction around the country and globally, it is important and helpful to realize that this models are nothing new; they are a return to centuries-old sustainable practices. As Ostrom, LaDuke, and many others have noted, the main reason why the indigenous resource management and land-use practices were trampled down is because the courts refused to uphold property held in commons. Now, in the nick of time with the CLT models and others, this is slowly changing.

Header image of Winona LaDuke courtesy of Honor The Earth

The post How Indigenous Land-Use Practices relate to Community Land Trusts & The Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Click here to download the book

• Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces – Preview
• Edited by Daniela Patti & Levente Polyák
• Cooperative City Books
• Eutropian Research & Action, Vienna, 2017
• ISBN 978-3-9504409-0-4
  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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Mai Sutton: Urban commons initiatives are booming in the Belgian city of Ghent, according to a new report. One of the researchers behind the study, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation, says that “the ecosystem of commons-based initiatives in Ghent is quite exemplary precisely because it covers an ecosystem in an area that requires a lot of capital and has to overcome a lot of commons-antagonistic regulation.” So against the odds, approximately 500 urban commons projects have sprung up in the last decade.

>A canal in Ghent. Photo: Dimitris Kamaras (CC-BY 2.0)

Last week, we wrote about the overall findings about the report. Below, we highlight a few standout examples of urban commons projects that are thriving in Ghent:

1. Wooncoop is a housing cooperative that gives home renters the same housing security as home owners. The cooperative buys, refurbishes, and mutualizes buildings — not the land on which they stand like a Community Land Trust. Once someone buys a share of Wooncoop, they can rent a house or apartment in one of their properties owned by the co-op. They are guaranteed housing there for a lifetime while paying reasonable rent for a well-maintained residence.
2. There is a multitude of innovative co-housing initiatives that have emerged in Ghent. But what is interesting is that people are not simply living together in a shared space, but rather, sharing various amenities. This includes sharing kitchens, guestrooms, and laundry rooms. This model works when a group of houses are designed collectively to share their facilities. However, local regulations have hindered the growth of this kind of co-housing development. Labland is a workshop and think-and-do-tank that is working to change policies on behalf of these experimental initiatives.

A park in Ghent. Photo: Dimitris Kamaras (CC-BY 2.0)

3. The City of Ghent facilitates the temporary use of local land and buildings. The most notable one is the Driemasterpark, a park that sits on a former industrial site in a poor neighborhood that is entirely managed by nearby residents. It was opened in late 2016, and in addition to having a playground, the park has spaces for chickens and dogs, and a vegetable garden.
4. Ghent has a thriving Community Land Trust(CLT). When public land becomes available, the city occasionally sets aside a percentage of land to the CLT so that it bypasses land speculation by real estate developers. The CLT keeps properties affordable and accessible to low-income residents.

View of Ghent from above. Photo: Gunvor Røkke (CC-BY 2.0)

5. Ghent’s food sector is where the commons is most developed. This is partly due to the public organizations in the city that are building political support for this work. Gent en Garde is a transition platform that endorses the demands of civil society for fair, organic, and local food. It created, among other things, the Urban Agriculture workshop, which is a working group of individuals and organizations whose mission is to create a more sustainable and healthy food ecosystem in Ghent.
6. Ghent’s public schools collectively provide about five million meals a year to their students. However, much of it tends to be the cheapest food they can order from remote multinational food producers.L unch met LEF is an initiative that aims to counteract this by bringing local, organic food to public schools. The group plans to transport the ingredients using cargo bike sharing, a zero-carbon transportation system.
7. A brainstorming session between a few Ghent urban commons leaders led to the idea of introducing pigs to vacant land, as an experiment in maximizing the use of unused public property in Ghent. Spilvarken started as a pilot project in 2014. A few weeks after three pigs were brought to the neighborhood, nearby residents voluntarily began taking care of them. Soon thereafter, the pigs because a center of community socializing, and a way for nearby residents to dispose of food waste as feed to the animals.

Solar panel installation in Ghent. Photo courtesy of Johan Eyckens

8. As a city that was inthe first cohort to sign the EU Covenant of Mayors in 2009, Ghent has created an ambitious plan to reduce its carbon emissions by the year 2030. One critical part of its strategy is the creation of a central governmental body called Energiecentrale. The agency serves as a contact point for locals to get support for anything related to making energy efficient renovations to their homes, businesses, and facilities. The agency provides free energy audits of homes and facilitates a “sustainable neighborhoods” program, by providing advice and financial support to get community-led energy efficiency initiatives, such as energy co-ops, off the ground.
9. The crown jewel of the city’s energy program is the community-owned Energent — a renewable energy cooperative with cheap shares that make membership accessible to most Ghent residents. The co-op started as an ambitious project, in coordination with the city, to furnish the majority of houses in the neighborhood of St. Amandsberg with solar panels. Individual solar power — in which people only get the power harnessed from their own panels — are expensive. Under a system like Energent, more people can afford to install solar panels. The problem of less productive, east-west roofs — called the intermittency problem or the unequal provision of energy due to weather — gets solved. This shows the the advantage of having a collective approach to energy provisioning.

Header image courtesy of Nathalie Snauwaert

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