Chapter 26 - Better Together: The Challenging, Transformative Complexity of Community, Land, and Trust - John Emmeus Davis

A community land trust is a vehicle with many moving parts, a clever assemblage of multiple adjustments to the way that land is owned, housing is operated, and a nonprofit developer is organized. Separately, each innovation is an improvement over the way that community development is normally done. But they are better together. More than the reinvention of ownership, operation, and organization, it is their combination that gives a CLT the vitality, resilience, and power to transform a place-based community. 

What is On Common Ground?

ON COMMON GROUND is a collection of original essays, written by 42 scholars and practitioners from a dozen countries, tracing the growth and diversification of the international community land trust movement.

A community land trust (CLT) is a transformative strategy of community-led development on community-owned land that has taken root in the Global North and is now spreading to the Global South. CLTs produce and preserve affordably priced homes, community gardens, retail spaces, and a variety of neighborhood facilities – all developed under the guidance of the people who live nearby; all managed to remain permanently affordable for people of modest means.