The Fair Housing Project, Thriving Communities campaign, is interested in what readers think about the ideas presented in this Shelterforce article “re-imagining” Community Land Trust (CLT) ground leases. The ideas expressed are aimed at creating mechanisms to permit more collective community use of land trust land. Please let us know with your comments if you have any opinions about these ideas. Most likely there are plenty of valid arguments both pro and con.
Source: Controlling Land Collectively: The CLT Ground Lease Reimagined – Shelterforce
“Community control of land should mean the ongoing capacity of people who are part of a community to make (and also remake or change) meaningful decisions about the use of that land.
Community control often gets conflated with affordability for neighborhoods seeing rising prices, and it’s obviously good (and sometimes vitally important) to make land stay affordable. But affordability is not the same as democratic decision-making about collectively owned land. If we are to imagine more explicit control over land through CLTs, what would it look like?”
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Source: Controlling Land Collectively: The CLT Ground Lease Reimagined – Shelterforce
I agree with Anthony Jones’ comment on the Shelterforce article. The CLT’s in Vermont are scattered single family homes. The homeowners didn’t buy them so that the other CLT members could take over their yard for a community garden or neighborhood playground. If you supplant the homeowner’s interests you will quickly see property values plummet as no one will want to buy those homes again.
Thanks for your comment Arthur. I had some of the same thoughts about this idea myself. It can already be difficult enough to sell the concept of limited equity housing to prospective buyers and if even more of their feeling of control of surroundings is taken away it would only make that more difficult.