A community land trust (CLT) is a nonprofit corporation that holds land on behalf of a place-based community, while serving as the long-term steward for affordable housing, community gardens, civic buildings, commercial spaces and other community assets on behalf of a community.
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. Across the world, there is enormous diversity among CLTs in the ways that real property is owned, used, and operated and the ways that the CLT itself is guided and governed by people living on and around a CLT’s land.
Historical overview
The community land trust (CLT) is a model of affordable housing and community development that has slowly spread throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom over the past 50 years. More recently, CLTs have begun to appear in the Global South as well.
Community land trusts trace their conceptual history to England’s Garden Cities, India's Gramdan Movement, and Israel’s cooperative agricultural settlements, the moshavim. As Robert Swann and his co-authors noted in The Community Land Trust: A New Model for Land Tenure in America (1972): "The ideas behind the community land trust...have historic roots" in the indigenous Americas, in pre-colonial Africa, and in ancient Chinese economic systems. Thus, "the goal is to 'restore' the land trust concept rather than initiate it."
The model was originated in the United States by Ralph Borsodi in the 1930s and later formalized and refined by Robert Swann, Simon Gottschalk, Erick S. Hansch, and Edward Webster in a seminal book published in 1972, entitled The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America. Borsodi, Swann, and their colleagues drew upon earlier examples of planned communities on leased land including the garden city movement in the United Kingdom, single tax communities inspired by Henry George in the USA, Gramdan villages in India, and moshav communities on lands owned by the Jewish National Fund in Israel. New Communities, Inc., the prototype for the modern-day community land trust, was formed in 1969 near Albany, Georgia, by local leaders of the Civil Rights Movement who were seeking a new way to achieve secure access to land for African American families.
According to the Schumacher Center for a New Economics website, "Swann was inspired by Ralph Borsodi and by Borsodi's work with J. P. Narayan and Vinoba Bhave, both disciples of Gandhi". Vinoba walked from village to village in rural India in the 1950s and 1960s, gathering people together and asking those with more land than they needed to give a portion of it to their poorer sisters and brothers. The initiative was known as the Bhoodan or Land gift movement, and many of India's leaders participated in these walks.
Some of the new landowners, however, became discouraged. Without tools to work the land and seeds to plant it, without an affordable credit system available to purchase these necessary things, the land was useless to them. They soon sold their deeds back to the large landowners and left for the cities. Seeing this, Vinoba altered the Boodan system to a Gramdan or Village gift system. All donated land was subsequently held by the village itself. The village would then lease the land to those capable of working it. The lease expired if the land was unused. The Gramdan movement inspired a series of regional village land trusts that anticipated Community Land Trusts in the United States.
The first organization to be labeled with the term 'community land trust' in the USA, called New Communities, Inc., was founded with the purpose of helping African-American farmers in the rural South to gain access to farmland, to work it cooperatively, and to have security in the single-family and multi-family housing they planned to build..
Precursors to this prototype for the modern CLT were the School of Living, founded by Ralph Borsodi in 1936, and the Celo Community in North Carolina, which was founded in 1938 by Arthur Ernest Morgan.