Community land trust

CLTs balance the needs of individuals who want security of tenure in occupying and using land and housing, with the needs of the surrounding community, striving to secure a variety of social purposes such as maintaining the affordability of local housing, preventing the displacement of vulnerable residents, and promoting economic and racial inclusion.

[citation needed][1] Community land trusts trace their conceptual history to England’s Garden Cities, India's Gramdan Movement, and Israel’s cooperative agricultural settlements, the moshavim.

It has a long and established legal history of leasing land to individuals, to cooperatives, and to intentional communities such as kibbutzim and moshavim.

Swann, Slater King, Charles Sherrod, Faye Bennett, director of the National Sharecroppers Fund, and four other Southerners travelled to Israel in 1968 to learn more about ground leasing.

In the 1980s, ICE began popularizing a new notion of the CLT, applying the model for the first time to problems of affordable housing, gentrification, displacement, and neighborhood revitalization in urban areas.

Under Matthei's tenure, the number of community land trusts increased from a dozen to more than 100 groups in 23 states, creating many hundreds of permanently affordable housing units, as well as commercial and public service facilities.

Matthei and his colleagues at the Institute for Community Economics also launched an effort in the early to mid-1980s to address many of the legal and operational questions about CLTs that were arising as banks, public officials and by an ecumenical association of churches and ministries created to prevent the displacement of low-income, African-American residents from their neighborhood.

In other cities, like Burlington, Vermont and Syracuse, New York, community land trusts were formed in partnership with a local government.

One of the most significant city-CLT partnerships was formed in 1989 when a CLT subsidiary of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative was granted the power of eminent domain by the City of Boston.

One of the earliest and most influential CLTs in the United States is the Burlington Community Land Trust (BCLT) in Vermont, which was founded in 1984 as an initiative of the municipal administration led by Mayor Bernie Sanders.

The BCLT was a response to rapidly increasing housing costs that threatened to price out many long term residents of the city.

But they have tended to have a greater focus on the participation of their local members and community-level democracy, and are more likely to emerge as grassroots citizen initiatives.

[citation needed] Research into, or the creation of fledgling CLT movements, has been occurring in other countries, including in Europe (France and Belgium),[13] on the African continent (Kenya),[14] and in Oceania (Australia,[15] New Zealand[16]) and The Netherlands.