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The community land trust (CLT) movement has grown from a single CLT in 1970 to nearly six hundred today, scattered across a dozen countries. While many people can be credited with the global spread of CLTs, eight individuals have been especially influential in pioneering, refining, and promoting this dynamic strategy of community-led development on community-owned land. Shirley Sherrod, Mtamanika Youngblood, Kirby White, Susan Witt, Gus Newport, Stephen Hill, María E. Hernández Torrales, and Yves Cabannes are "elders" of a movement they helped to create.Interviews conducted with them over the past decade were edited for the present volume in collaboration with the elders themselves. Their stories combine personal history and critical reflection, retracing the roads that led to their involvement with CLTs and charting the paths they believe CLTs should pursue to ensure the movement's continued growth. Starting from different backgrounds and careers, these eight individuals came to a similar realization. Disadvantaged classes, races, and places could be made less precarious and more prosperous by changing the way that land is owned. Community ownership, in particular, would make equitable development more likely. They became advocates for the CLT, therefore, mainly because they found it to be a practical tool for converting the land beneath homes, businesses, facilities, and farms from a speculative commodity bought and sold for private gain into a community asset used to promote the common good. Over the years, their advocacy has extended to all aspects of the community land trust, including resident engagement and permanent affordability, but they have championed the "L" in CLT above all. Land reform is what CLTs are "really about" in the eyes of these elders--reweaving the tapestry of tenure to enable place-based communities to bend the arc of their own development toward justice.

As community land trusts (CLTs) have grown in number and spread around the world, the model itself has changed. There are now many variations of what is sometimes known as the "classic" CLT. What has not changed, however, is the dynamic tension between impactful development and community empowerment that was baked into the structure and purpose of the CLT from the very beginning. Every community land trust attempts to gain control over enough land, housing, and other land-based assets to make a difference in the lives of low-income and moderate-income people. At the same time as it is expanding its portfolio of real estate, a CLT is also dedicated to expanding and engaging its social base--continuously organizing, informing, and involving members of its chosen community in guiding and governing the CLT itself. Ownership and empowerment go hand-in-hand.These dual goals are often seen as incompatible within the larger field of community development. Even within the smaller world of CLTs, there is an ongoing debate as to whether there exists an inevitable tradeoff between going to scale versus ceding control to the community served by a CLT. That debate is the focus of the present monograph. Although several contributors take one side or the other, most portray the CLT as occupying a rhetorical and practical middle ground between impact and empowerment. They provide examples of successful CLTs in which involving residents in guiding and governing the organization has been the basis for increasing a CLT's holdings of land and housing, rather than being a barrier to growth. In these organizations, the dual goals of a CLT are reconciled and brought skillfully, sustainably into balance. All of the chapters in the present monograph, except for the opening essay by Emily Thaden and Tony Pickett, were selected from On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust. This earlier collection of twenty-six original essays was published by Terra Nostra Press in June 2020.

The community land trust (CLT) is a transformative strategy of community-led development on community-owned land that is taking root across the Global North and is now spreading to the Global South. CLTs produce and preserve affordably priced homes, retail spaces, urban (and rural) aglands, and a variety of neighborhood facilities – all developed under the auspices of people who live nearby; all managed to remain permanently affordable for people of modest means. Because of the way these assets are owned and because of the way these organizations are governed, CLTs offer new answers to fundamental questions of “who decides?” and “who benefits?” that should be asked whenever governments, charities, or NGOs invest scarce resources in improving the places where people live. CLTs are not all alike. Among the hundreds that exist in a dozen different countries, there are numerous variations in how these organizations are structured, how their lands are utilized, how development is done, and how assets are stewarded for future generations. What is called a "community land trust" can vary greatly from one locality to another. Despite this lack of uniformity, advocates and practitioners have advanced a consistent set of arguments in favor of this strategy. Their multi-faceted case for the CLT says, in essence: When land is owned for the common good of a place-based community, present and future; when development is done by an organization that is a creature of that community, rooted in it, accountable to it, and guided by it; when stewardship is deliberate, diligent, and durable . . . development is more likely to be both equitable and sustainable, especially in places populated by classes and races who have long been disadvantaged and disempowered.The six essays contained in this monograph are drawn from a lengthier volume entitled On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust. Most of that volume’s twenty-six chapters were focused on describing conditions, organizations, and polices that precipitated the appearance of CLTs in a range of urban and rural settings. But a number of chapters also looked closely at the philosophy behind this unconventional approach to real property, exploring various ethical, political, and practical justifications for the CLT. These essays were selected for the present monograph. Together, they provide a coherent and compelling rationale for why community land trusts are worthy of consideration, implementation, and support.   

Durante mucho tiempo, miles de personas de bajos ingresos en Am├⌐rica Latina y el Caribe han ocupado terrenos urbanos y rurales, o han utilizado sus recursos naturales, incluidos cuerpos de agua, bosques, praderas y campos cultivables, sin tener el derecho oficial de hacerlo o sin que sus Gobiernos respeten los derechos registrados. Viven en hogares que posiblemente fueron construidos, rehabilitados y ocupados por sus familias durante varias generaciones, pero estos est├ín situados en solares de los que podr├¡an desalojarlos alg├║n d├¡a. Dependen de cuencas hidrogr├íficas, bosques o tierras agr├¡colas para su sustento, pero es posible que alg├║n d├¡a pierdan el acceso a los recursos que utilizan. En muchos de los casos, su tenencia es informal e insegura. El desplazamiento es una amenaza siempre presente.Para atender el problema de inseguridad de la tenencia de la tierra, una cantidad cada vez mayor de defensores y activistas a trav├⌐s de la regi├│n han adoptado una estrategia pr├ícticamente desconocida en Am├⌐rica Latina y el Caribe, pero que resulta muy prometedora: el fideicomiso comunitario de tierras.  Esta estrategia tiene muchas variaciones. No obstante, un aspecto com├║n en todos los fideicomisos comunitarios de tierras es el mejoramiento de la seguridad de la tenencia de la tierra y la prevenci├│n del desplazamiento a trav├⌐s del control comunitario de la tierra. Es decir, una organizaci├│n adquiere y administra los terrenos en nombre de la comunidad all├¡ establecida, la cual, a su vez, dirige y gobierna dicha organizaci├│n. Hemos seleccionado el contenido de esta monograf├¡a de un volumen mucho m├ís largo titulado "En terreno com├║n: perspectivas internacionales sobre los fideicomisos comunitarios de tierras". Escogimos estos cinco ensayos porque abordan un tema similar: la incidencia y las repercusiones de la inseguridad de la tenencia de la tierra en Am├⌐rica Latina y el Caribe. Con el fin de resolver este problema, tambi├⌐n discuten una estrategia similar que muchas personas en la regi├│n han adoptado para asegurar su futuro: el control comunitario de la tierra. 

Fifty years ago, African-American activists in Albany, Georgia extended their political fight for civil rights into the economic realm by creating New Communities Inc. They had come to believe that owning land was essential to securing greater independence for their people. But landownership was out-of-reach for most African-Americans in the Deep South of the 1960s and too easily lost if they did acquire a small farm, a plot of land, or a house in town. The visionary founders of New Communities concluded, therefore, that community ownership would be a more secure form of tenure. Community-owned land could be combined, moreover, with the individual ownership of newly built houses, offering low-income people an opportunity to become homeowners. Community-owned land could also provide a platform for the cooperative organization of various enterprises, offering low-income people a chance for economic prosperity.This ingenious hybrid, blending multiple owners and uses under the watchful eye of a community-controlled, nonprofit organization, was the prototype for what eventually became, after some fine-tuning in subsequent years, the “community land trust” (CLT).There are now over 260 CLTs in the United States and over 300 in England and Wales. Others have been established in Australia, Belgium, Canada, and France. Interest has also been rising in Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Scotland, and Spain. More recently, the seeds for new CLTs have been scattering across the Global South as well, inspired by a high-profile CLT in Puerto Rico that is securing the homes of hundreds of families residing in informal settlements in San Juan. This has attracted the attention of communities struggling with land and housing insecurity throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, ranging from the urban residents of Brazil’s favelasto indigenous peoples in rural regions where their customary, collective use of homesteads, forests, and watersheds is often unprotected by formal title. Activists in Africa and South Asia have also taken note, weighing whether a CLT might promote equitable and sustainable development in their own communities.On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust explores the growth of this worldwide CLT movement. The book’s twenty-six original essays, contributed by forty-two authors from a dozen different countries, cover five general topics: BRIGHT IDEAS survey the conceptual and practical justifications for community-led development on community-owned land; NATIONAL NETWORKS examine the proliferation and cross-pollination of CLTs in the Global North; REGIONAL SEEDBEDS explore the potential for CLT development in the Global South; URBAN APPLICATIONS showcase the success of selected CLTs in London, Brussels, Boston, Burlington, and Denver, a handful of highly productive CLTs that are providing affordable housing, spurring neighborhood revitalization, and securing land for urban agriculture; CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES reflect on the changing environment to which CLTs must adapt if they are to “go to scale,” while remaining accountable to the communities they serve.