Sarah Boden decided it was time to swap her busy London life as a music journalist in order to reconnect to the land and community life on the Scottish Isle of Eigg. Thanks to the community’s buy-out of the Island in 1997, it was all made possible. This is a story of a community who have fought and won their rights to their future. This film is part of the Global Call to Action Campaign, aimed at doubling the global area of land legally recognized as owned or controlled by Indigenous Peoples and local communities by 2020.

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Towards a New Reconstruction: Land, Racism, and Economic Emancipation

While in New York, we attended the 38th Annual E.F. Schumacher Lectures in Great Barrington, MA. The birthplace of W.E.B. Du Bois, Great Barrington was an ideal place for these lectures and discussions. W.E.B. Du Bois is a hero to the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, the host of this lecture, whose mission is to envision a just and sustainable global economy, apply the concepts locally, and share the results for broad use.

(To add an interesting footnote to this history and Du Bois’s work, Agrarian Trust’s Director, Ian McSweeney, told us of the personal connection an ancestor of his had to Du Bois. Ian’s great-great grandfather’s brother, Edward F. McSweeney, was a collaborator with and supporter of W.E.B. Du Bois. Edward F. McSweeney wrote the introduction to “The Gift of Black Folk,” corresponded with Du Bois, and advocated for increased immigration.)

The lectures celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of Du Bois, who was the first black man to receive a PhD from Harvard, a founder of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, author of massive scholarly works and books, and a steadfast advocate for the rights of disenfranchised people. On a cold, rainy day in Great Barrington, Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm and Ed Whitfield of the Fund for Democratic Communities built on the legacy Du Bois left this world by speaking about cooperative structures, equitable land access, and black economic development. Penniman works to end racism in the food system, and Whitfield is committed to developing non-extractive finance models and investment structures that enable community self-determination and supporting reparations.

Economic Justice & Redirecting Community Wealth

“We need not think our task is expansion of capital but expansion of community wealth,” Whitfield shared during his talk. By understanding and identifying how community wealth has been generated and managed, he suggested, we can redirect it to elevate the quality of life for all. The Southern Reparations Loan Fund, where Whitfield is a board member, is developing a “financial commons” to enable democratic access to non-extractive financing. Non-extractive financing works by providing working capital to enterprises that build local wealth through worker ownership without collateral or debt. Instead, models like Southern Reparations Loan Fund provide coaching with the capital, and loans are paid back when a project succeeds. This way, financial capital is a tool for communities and workers, rather than the other way around.

For decades, Whitfield has shown an unflagging commitment to true and lasting economic justice for all. What does this kind of justice look like? Is it that we can choose what kind of fast food we want or that we can afford to choose healthy food? Whitfield has no problem with questioning everything, even old parables that we often repeat without thinking, in order to uncover deeper truth and more meaning. (See, for example, this video from the New Economy Coalition: “Ed Whitfield on why the ‘teaching a man to fish’ parable is a lie.”)

Whitfield cautions against “compromising with a corrupt system [which] takes away our humanity.” He asserts that we must organize to create new models and shift our paradigms to ensure that every person has a chance to be fully human, which includes a chance to benefit from the product of their labor and be productive, expressing their dignity through their work. Our collective work must be an engine for social equality and justice, where the wealth that is created elevates the quality of life for our communities.  

Last year, I read Ed Whitfield’s piece at Fund for Democratic Communities called “Nevermind Guaranteed Income, We Want the Cow.” It is bold, and I was glad when he readdressed the concepts during the lecture. The cliffnotes are that guaranteed annual income serves to give citizens more access to consume. In doing so, it greases the wheels of capitalism and enables those with power and resources to obtain more through the same system, changing nothing about how labor is organized or how wealth is distributed. Whitfield illustrates with a story from Rev. Bugani Finca who played a role in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation efforts. The story goes that Tabo, whose cow was stolen, gets an apology from Mr. Smith, the thief. After reconciliation, Tabo says, “Well, what about the cow?” To which Mr. Smith replies: “You are ruining our reconciliation. This has nothing to do with a cow!” Without the means to produce (the cow in this case), power and resources are simply retained by the Mr. Smiths. Disparities increase between those who’ve taken the resources and those whose resources have been stolen.

So, what does all this mean for our work at Agrarian Trust? First, we will listen to those “thrown away,” exploited, excluded, and otherwise oppressed by the old economy and commit to working together to build a new economy that works for all of us. Land held in commons will also serve as a base, a shared resource for this new economy and for disenfranchised people.

“Once the earth belonged to us all, but it is now ‘owned’ by a few who exploit its resources and determine the conditions for its use. They own the community’s wealth that was generated by the labor of us all,” says Whitfield. We whole-heartedly agree when he affirms that “land is foundation, water is life, air is essential, life on earth is sacred. Everything else is human social production which should be instrumental to the sacred. Somehow, though the expansion of capital has used up the air, water, and earth. We’ve got it backwards. It’s stupid!” Using community wealth to regenerate the earth and enrich all that is sacred, our humanity very much included, is how an agrarian commons will sustain itself and its communities.

The Facts of Food Apartheid: Our Food System Isn’t Broken—It’s Working Just As Intended

Our food system needs a redesign if it’s to feed us without perpetuating racism and oppression. After decades of discrimination by the federal government, Black farmers have lost almost all of our land. Reparations for past harm are the first step to justice. Ultimately, we are working toward food sovereignty, where all people exercise the right to control our own food systems—including in cities.”

– Leah Penniman, “4 Not-So-Easy-Ways to Dismantle Racism in the Food System, in YES! Magazine, April 2017

Penniman began her talk by sharing how she was not one for theory without practice or without very physical, tangible work. Anyone who hears her speak can discern that a deep ethical framework informs her labor, but it’s also reinforced with on-the-ground effort and the love she puts into her work. Her connection to her community and ancestors plays a central role in her organizing and her many expressions of both written and spoken word. As she says, [it is] Western to wonder who THE person with THE idea was—it’s a community always.”

With this spirit, she asked us to reflect on how our accomplishments and capacity came from those before us, inviting us to name an ancestor whose efforts, big or small, enabled us to be here. Penniman grounded us further by acknowledging the original stewards of the land that the place we call “Great Barrington” today is a part of—the Mohicans. We then traveled briefly through our history to explore some of the repercussions that are still with us today in the United States. To name just one major influence of our colonial past, consider that Manifest Destiny, or the Doctrine of Discovery—the ridiculous and life-threatening notion that wherever you plant a flag, the land is yours—is still very much in play today. Even recently, a Supreme Court case (City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York) held that reacquired land, bought by the Oneida Indian Nation, could not return to reservation status and tribal sovereignty due to the standards of “federal equity.” This is especially ironic considering the legal meaning of equity in civil procedure in this case. Our historical memory suffers from amnesia across the United States, so it is no surprise that these repercussions are largely allowed by those in power.

We also traveled to Africa, where Africans were kidnapped to be slaves in the colonies. Those that were kidnapped were often people with deep knowledge of tropical and subtropical agriculture. They were the agricultural experts that the captors needed to make their plantations profitable in the American South. We then moved through the Jim Crow era (and the rootlets of the New Jim Crow today) where people continued to be enslaved for petty crimes, some of which weren’t real crimes at all. Not having a job was considered a crime in the 19th century in some jurisdictions, and therefore, newly freed black people could be imprisoned and then leased out to plantation owners. Money from the leases went to the states, keeping the southern economy intact during the Reconstruction era. Scholar Douglas Blackmon refers to this practice as “slavery by another name,” in his Pulitzer-prize winning book and PBS documentary by the same title.  

Despite this neo-enslavement, black people still managed to save enough money to purchase 60 million acres of land by 1914. Now this land is almost gone. When so much of what was lost hasn’t been recognized, or even understood by most Americans, the past will continue wreaking havoc on attempts to create equity today. When what was lost is almost entirely controlled by white families—98% of U.S. farmland is controlled by people of European descent—it is no wonder the wealth gap continues to widen dramatically, reaching a ratio of more than 13:1 in the white to black median net worth of households.

At the peak of black land ownership, white supremacist violence escalated. Violence and intimidation was targeted at black landowners, typically during harvest time. That way, black people could be arrested and leased to white farmers during harvest. The Great Migration north of 6 million black people seeking to escape this violence was, in fact, as Penniman reframes it, a refugee crisis. For many black people, it was not a choice to leave the land; it was necessity. What they met in the north was insidious—redlining, an inability to secure loans, both de jure and de facto segregation, deeply entrenched patterns of racial discrimination. How does one keep the product of her labor or realize its full value without the fundamental basis of wealth in the U.S., property ownership? How can the wealth gap numbers stop widening when so much of what was lost hasn’t been returned?

Today, both producers and consumers, including all of us, participate in maintaining a food system that relies on stolen land and stolen labor. Many aspects of industrial food production, processing, aggregation, and distribution are so dehumanizing that we have internationalized and turned to ‘cheap labor’ to prop up injust, unsustainable industries. Not only is industrial agriculture dehumanizing, but it can be dangerous. The highest level of workplace injury and death in agriculture is from pesticide exposure. Predictably, the food this system produces is harming all of us, too. Despite the U.S. having enormous wealth and resources, including the largest economy in the world, diet-related diseases are at an all time high. Many communities live in what have been called ‘food deserts,’ but food apartheid, a concept described by farmer/activist Karen Washington, is the proper term for what we see in communities as a result of our current food system. It’s human-created, not naturally occurring. To paraphrase Penniman and her retelling of the Iroquois origin story involving Sky Woman’s gift of corn to humanity, “we are taking the gift and turning it into a weapon [through monocropping, GMOs, corn syrup, suing indigenous farmers over seeds, and more].”

Just as racism and violence have ripped families and communities apart since colonial times in this country, there has been strength, wisdom, morality, and innovation countering it, ever seeking to create something new and life-giving. Much of this counter-narrative and practice has been nurtured from within black culture and communities. As Whitfield says, “As long as oppressive systems and concentrated power exist, we will always have to do some resistance and advocacy work, but we need to remember that the goal is for us to organize ourselves to be the power within our own lives and communities. We must create the world we want to live in by doing for ourselves.”

Just in the past century in agriculture: George Washington Carver was the first professor to teach organic agriculture, very much like we know it today. Booker T. Whatley developed innovations that led to the CSA and pick-your-own models before they were well-known. A history of cooperatives isn’t complete without Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farm Cooperative, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and many more.

Building the Agrarian Commons

How can Agrarian Trust operate responsibly to undo the practices that our country’s history has enabled? How can our models be adapted to the needs of displaced and marginalized people seeking to reconnect to land?

This process of inquiry and action will start by listening to and working alongside those directly affected with an understanding that our humanity and liberation are bound together. Part of this process requires that we also consider our organization’s own demographics. Agrarian Trust currently has a small staff of four white people who live and work primarily on the East Coast and in the Southeast. We work in collaboration with many other organizations, large and small, many of which are also geographically widespread and racially diverse. It’s important for us to deeply and routinely think through how we can best play our roles individually and as a team in building racial equity and supporting social justice.

We believe in creating a world we all want to live in, a world that serves the well-being of all of humanity and the earth. Our agrarian commons models seek to provide opportunities for communities to be productive and build wealth and collective power through mutual interdependence. In other words, we believe in securing the cow, not just a supply of butter. An agrarian commons can contribute to democratizing community wealth, enabling communities to be their own “community developers.”

Specifically, we are working toward many local “Agrarian Commons” throughout the U.S. where local communities collectively hold title to land and grant equitable, long-term tenure to farmers. Creating a structure to return equity and self determination to communities, individuals, and the land itself, our commons example includes Boards comprised of local communities, farmers holding tenure on the farms held in commons, local stakeholders, and other local community organizations. Agrarian Trust believes we must use our position and power to create local land holding justice that begins to address inequities.

It’s a constant process of inquiry to create a new story, a new economy. But we can’t change the story, and all the policies and actions that stem from it, until we ask the right questions and uncover the truth. Thank you, Leah Penniman, Ed Whitfield, and the communities that support you, for sharing the truths that will inform our collective work.

Further Reading & Resources:

• Farming While Black, Leah Penniman (2018)
• Principles of Black Political Economy, Lloyd Hogan (1984)
• The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
• A more in-depth look at the issues we attempt to share here, as told by Leah Penniman, in The New Food Economy’s interview: https://newfoodeconomy.org/food-apartheids-farming-while-black-leah-penniman-soul-fire-farm-interview/.

Reposted from Agrarian Trust.

The post Building an Agrarian Commons: Learning from Farmers & Community Organizers 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.

A historical legacy of displacement and exclusion, firmly rooted in racism and discriminatory public policy, has fundamentally restricted access to land and housing and shaped ownership dynamics, particularly for people of color and low-income communities. Today, many communities across the country are facing new threats of instability, unaffordability, disempowerment, and displacement due to various economic, demographic, and cultural changes that are putting increased pressure on land and housing resources.

As communities and policymakers alike consider ways to confront these threats—especially within the context of the urgent need for community and economic development—there is an emerging opportunity to develop strategies related to land and housing that can help create inclusive, participatory, and sustainable economies built on locally-rooted, broad-based ownership of place-based assets. This report provides an overview of strategies and tools that, as a group, represent an innovative and potentially powerful new approach—one that establishes, in various ways, community control of land and housing.

These strategies and tools can 1) begin to institutionalize democratic control of land and housing, 2) support racially and economically inclusive ownership and access, and 3) catalyze the deployment of public resources to support new norms of land and housing activity. Importantly, “anchor institutions”—large not-for-profit entities, such as hospitals and universities, that are rooted in local communities—can play a key role alongside community organizations and local governments in catalyzing and supporting such strategies.

Download and read the full report now.

We are making printed copies of this new report available to policy advocates, community organizers, and anchor institution stakeholders interested in advancing on the ground work to shift control of land and housing to communities through democratic ownership. Request copies now.

The post Community Control of Land and Housing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Mill workers of Mumbai have a 150-year tradition of struggle. When the mills went into decline in the 1980s and 1990s, they continued to fight, first for their jobs, and when mills closed anyway, for their right to live in the city. Six hundred acres of mill lands belonging to 50 or so textile mills had become prime real estate and was developed into luxury offices, apartments, clubs and malls. This was land that had been given to mill owners over a century ago solely for industrial purposes. Workers demanded a part of the land for workers’ housing. The struggle resulted in legislation granting rights over a portion of the land. 8,000 apartments have been offered so far and construction of a further 18,000 units is ongoing. The government says it is looking for more land to meet the target of 100,000-150,000 units. The struggle continues.

GKSS, an independent mill union/committee set up in 1990, organised demonstrations, occupations, lobbying with parliamentarians, negotiations with government, media advocacy, street barricades, sit ins, and marches. The state overtly and covertly supported the mill owners. What worked in the end was dogged persistence, an effective strategy of broad and multiple alliances, the political and electoral importance of mill workers, and the sympathy of lower level police and bureaucrats who were from mill families.

This struggle is unique for its strategies, and the importance of fighting for concrete gains for the constituency and for the broader community.

Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us.

Or visit the Mill Workers Action Committee’s Facebook

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

The post Mumbai: Winning textile workers’ housing rights appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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.

The post Activists transform an abandoned hospital into affordable housing in London appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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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Photo by byzantiumbooks

The post Permanently Affordable Housing: Challenges and Potential Paths Forward appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Land grabs, the controversial acquisition of large parcels of land by governments or corporations, are nothing new in the United States. Beginning with settler colonialism and the Dawes Act, continuing through the Civil Rights era, all the way through to today’s large-scale corporate and institutional investment portfolios, the United States has a long history of land grabbing, particularly from Native communities and communities of color. What is new is the increasing involvement of individual investors in these land grabs through their participation in Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs. Previously focused on housing tracts, apartment complexes, and shopping malls, REITs are increasingly being created to facilitate the transfer of large amounts of wealth directly into centralized farmland ownership to do one thing: make money. You may never have heard of a REIT before, but everyone interested in creating a just and equitable food system should become familiar with these troubling investment tools. Here are three reasons why.

Farmland REITs put profit over principle. As an investment tool, the primary goal of a REIT is to generate a profit for its investors. This means that all other considerations, including the needs of farmworkers, farmers, soil health, surrounding community, and watersheds are secondary to the profitability of the asset, if they are considered at all. Farmland REIT managers see themselves as participants in a global food economy, which also means that they are likely to shift cropping practices and employment practices based on global market demands instead of responding to local needs.

Farmland REITs treat land as an asset in a portfolio instead of a natural resource in an ecosystem. As terrestrial beings, we have an inherent connection to land that, through place-based ownership or stewardship, can foster the growth and expression of our highest and best selves. When that connection to the land is taken away, as it has been forcibly done to Native peoples through settler colonialism, to Black people through enslavement and Jim Crow, and to many peasant farming communities in Central America, Southeast Asia, and Africa through international trade agreements – the social, economic, and ecological consequences are devastating. REITs are legal entities that are the real-world results of an economic and legal system that not only allows, but incentivizes, the commodification of land as a financial asset. One REIT manager put it this way, “the idea for the [American Farmland] Company was based on noting that U.S. farmland property values have generally been increasing over the long term….”

Farmland REITs recreate feudal relationships between landowners and land stewards. REITs acquire land, often from active farmers, then re-lease the land back to the farmer as a tenant on short-term leases, averaging 2-3 years for row crops and 5-8 years for orchards. If you were a farmer, would you invest in equipment, soil health, or water quality and conservation if you might be evicted in a few years? The result for farmers is that they have no incentive, let alone control, to invest in sustainable practices like crop rotation, cover cropping, no-till cultivation, native hedgerows, or other long-term cultivation practices that enhance soil quality, water retention capacity, and pollinator habitat. The result for the community is the loss of healthy local food production, exploitation of local human and agricultural resources, and wealth extraction by absentee landlords.

“There’s a reason I’m a landlord and not a farmer.” – Paul Pittman, CEO, Farmland Partners, Inc.

Farmland REITS know this, and in fact, are betting on it as a profitable strategy. The CEOs of these REITs, by their own words, understand and take pride in their status as landlords. Paul Pittman, CEO or Farmland Partners, Inc., a REIT with over 150,000 acres in its portfolio, says “there’s a reason I’m a landlord and not a farmer.” One reason might be that most REITs require their tenants to pay the entire year’s rent up front, in cash, before spring planting. So, at the same time that farmers need cash to purchase inputs and hire workers and before they’ve even sown a crop, let alone sold anything, they are expected to pay the entire year’s rent. Or, as David Gladstone, CEO of Gladstone Land Corporation, a REIT with nearly 34,000 acres in its portfolio, puts it, “[Y]eah, well the farmer takes on most of the risk, obviously.”

This exploitation of land and labor that investor-based land ownership deploys is why farmland REITs are so dangerous to the future of our food system, rural economies, and the land commons. Farmland REITs are essentially betting on a formula of increasing global food demand and shrinking availability of farmland to generate profits for their primarily wealthy investors. While most REIT investors are wealthy individuals, some REITs are also publicly traded, which means that ordinary people’s investment and retirement accounts may also be invested in a farmland REIT as part of a portfolio. Many of us wouldn’t know if this was the case unless we very carefully scrutinized each investment we made – something that is very important but not very easy to do.

Farmland REITs, public and private, continue to grow. According to Pittman, “this can be a multi-billion-dollar business, and that is our goal.”

Well, we have a different goal. Tune back in next week to read the second part of this blog. We’ll focus on existing and emerging principles and legal tools for community-based land acquisition and management models around the country. From community land trusts to real estate investment cooperatives to worker-ownership, these are the mechanisms that will help us start to grab the land back.

By Neil Thapar, Food and Farmland Attorney / republished from the Sustainable Economies Law Center blog

Photo by DaraDPhotography

The post The Future of Farmland (Part 1): The New Land Grab appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Watch the film and hear from a panel of speakers – including filmmaker Chris Malloy and Birgit Cameron, Director of Patagonia Provisions- and taste Patagonia Provisions’ organic food sourced from our partners featured in the film.

Visit Patagonia Provisions to learn more about the food we offer and what makes us different.”

You may find the Film Tour Dates here.

Photo by StateofIsrael

The post Towards Regenerative Agriculture: The Unbroken Ground documentary appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Last August, 200 people from across Oakland, California came together to envision and design a development plan for a small parcel of public land. For months leading up to that day, community members and neighborhood coalitions had been organizing against a controversial – and possibly illegal – plan to develop a luxury high-rise apartment complex on land owned by the City of Oakland, in a neighborhood where 75% of residents are low or very-low income and 75% are renters. Having succeeded in pressuring the City to back out of the initially proposed deal with UrbanCore Development through creative direct action and sophisticated community organizing, organizers with the E12th St Coalition wanted to create a visionary community-driven alternative – and the E12th WishList People’s Planning Forum was convened. On a sunny Sunday afternoon near Oakland’s Lake Merritt, hundreds of people shared their visions for what could be done with this public land – and not a single person envisioned a market-rate housing complex on that site.

Photo by Save the E12th Parcel for the People

The result of this community planning process: The E12th St. People’s Proposal. This visionary plan, compiled by the E12 St. Coalition in partnership with nonprofit developer Satellite Affordable Housing Associates, includes a 100% affordable housing complex, a public park, commercial space for local businesses, and more. (The grassroots coalition has formally submitted the People’s Proposal to the City of Oakland for consideration and is currently competing against two other proposals, neither of which include anything close to 100% affordable housing.) All of this has been motivated by the radical idea that public land should be used for public good. Radical indeed in a region with one of the fastest increasing land values in the country.

This is just one of many hopeful stories of communities coming together to simultaneously challenge the conventional profit-driven process of economic development, and assert community-driven alternatives that do not displace existing communities. What is foundational to the call for “development without displacement” is a claim to community self-determination, that communities have both the right and the capacity to set their own priorities and pathways for creating more equitable neighborhoods. In other words, communities have the collective right to participate in the processes that shape their future, particularly those most impacted by those processes. The E12th St People’s Proposal is visionary both in what it imagines – a 100% affordable housing development in the heart of one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country – and in who it allowed to imagine and shape the development process.

At this point, there is widespread acknowledgment that the Bay Area is experiencing a housing crisis. However, proposed solutions to the crisis rarely seem to identify or address its root causes, and are most often framed in a market-vs-state binary. But what if that framework – that it will be either the market or the state that solves the housing crisis – is one of those root causes? What if communities themselves, particularly those that have been historically neglected by both the state and the market, were enabled to create their own solutions?

The initial E12 St controversy perfectly illustrates the problematic relationship between the state and the market. It was in the City’s narrow financial interest to try to sneak through a deal with a for-profit developer to build a “market-rate” high-rise apartment complex with one-bedroom apartments starting at over $3,000 per month. To put this in perspective, “market-rate” is now only affordable to household making $113,000 or more in yearly income, while the median income for the area surrounding the Eastlake neighborhood is $38,363. Particularly in a country where wealth is so unequally distributed – wealth initially accumulated through the theft of land, labor, knowledge, and natural resources of Indigenous, African, and other non-European people – the provision of a basic right such as housing should not be left solely to a system where money buys power and certain groups of people are systematically dispossessed.

The state, supposedly the counterbalance to the market, actually creates the necessary conditions for the market to operate in this way. In the case of the East 12th St Parcel, it has taken almost a year of sustained organizing, direct action, community engagement, investigative journalism, and legal analysis to even get the state to consider a proposal for affordable housing, something it is in fact required to prioritize under the Surplus Lands Act.

Perhaps it’s time we collectively acknowledge that the traditional model of profit-driven economic development tends to be part of the problem, rather than the solution. “Economic development,” writes Shawn Escoffery in the preface to the Democracy Collaborative’s recently published report Cities Building Community Wealth, “operates on an implicit assumption that everyone benefits from a city’s prosperity and economic growth. But that’s a sad fallacy.” A recent study by the Brookings Institute shows that income inequality has actually worsened in the nation’s largest 50 cities since 2012 – indicating that the wealthiest have captured most of the economic gains since the financial collapse of 2007. And, of course, even that class inequality is not evenly distributed: by at least one study, the median net worth of a white household in America today is $116,000, compared to only $1,700 for a black household.

So what might be an alternative? Stories like the East 12th Street struggle begin to point the way by demonstrating an oppositional and visionary alternative. Their actions also imply some basic questions like: What if housing was treated primarily as, well, housing, rather than an investment? What if we recognized land as a living source of common wealth rather than an abstract commodity? What if community development was actually shaped by all members of the community, not just the most privileged and most likely to profit?

One way to potentially achieve this is to manage our cities as a commons. The commons is a socio-economic system that has been implemented for millennia in societies across the globe to steward a wide variety of resources and cultures. But a commons can arise anytime a group of people decide to collectively manage an essential resource, with special regard for equitable access and long-term stewardship (to paraphrase a definition by commons scholar and activist, David Bollier). How might seeing our cities as a commons lead to more equitable forms of community development? Here are some ideas:

Land as a commons: None of us created the land beneath your feet or beneath your home. So why should certain people profit off its existence while many more are excluded from even having a place to sleep? In a land commons, the community of residents would collectively determine priorities for land use, perhaps in a process similar to the E12th WishList People’s Planning Forum. Many communities across the country are rediscovering the community land trust (CLT) as a tool for community-ownership and control of land. By separating the value of the land from the structures and activities happening on the land, a community land trust allows a community to permanently preserve the affordability of and equitable access to land for housing, urban farming, local businesses, and other community-determined uses. Originally developed by civil rights organizers and farmers in the South who were systematically denied access to land, the CLT model is again being deployed in urban communities of color as a strategy for community wealth building and resisting economic displacement.

Housing as a commons: While the CLT is one mechanism for the commons-based management of land, housing cooperatives and intentional communities are similar models for collective management of housing and living spaces. Popularly associated with hippies and other crunchy white people, housing cooperatives and intentional communities actually have a long history as tools of survival in the African-American community and many other marginalized communities. From the extensive network of low-income housing cooperatives in New York City created in the 1970s to the “Panther Pads” created by the Black Panther Party as political safe houses in the 1970s to Cooperation Jackson’s current vision of urban ecovillages, cooperatively owned and managed housing can be economically efficient, ecologically sustainable, and socially regenerative. Such an approach can help ensure that many more people are housed using existing housing stock and, as importantly, begin to recreate our relationship to houses as spaces for social and economic production, rather than financial speculation and exclusion.

Photo by Imani Khayyam.

Livelihoods as a commons: Displacement and gentrification are not simply about housing affordability. Certain communities are vulnerable to displacement because of generations of disinvestment, job discrimination, mass incarceration, educational inequality, environmental injustice, and more. In a highly monetized society, people should have a right to dignified and productive livelihoods – it’s no coincidence that both Martin Luther King, Jr and the Black Panther Party called for full employment for all people. Allowing people to both own and control their own labor, for example through worker cooperatives and multi-stakeholder cooperatives, has been shown to create more stable, dignified, and higher-paying jobs over the long-term. Furthermore, reducing income inequality is actually better for everyone, not just the poor: numerous studies have shown that life expectancy and other indicators of personal and social health is lower in societies with higher income inequality.

These are all ideas we are actively working on or thinking about at SELC. We’re also developing new ideas for cooperatively financing and managing housing and land as a commons, and creating new legal structures for the commons-based management of, well, everything. Read more about our Housing Program, Cooperative Program, and local policy work and stay tuned for more.

The commons offers a framework and a process for effectively and equitably stewarding the resources communities need to live in dignity. If we have a collective right to a resource, we should be able to participate in decisions about that resource’s use. From this perspective, all sorts of things start to look like they should be managed as commons: healthcare commons, learning commons, restorative justice commons, renewable energy commons, financial service commons, investment commons, food commons, water commons. It also happens that all of these things are being horribly mismanaged at the moment, literally putting life on earth in peril. So what about this for a radical idea: let people participate in the decisions that most directly affect their everyday lives.

Photo by Mister-Mastro

The post Community Development and the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.