🏡💚 Community land trusts are growing in CA
October 20th, 2023
There are some big conferences this week, and I know many of you are likely attending Greenlining’s Just Futures Summit. Also this week (and also happening in Oakland) is the California Community Land Trust Network’s (CA CLT Network) annual conference that brings together advocates, practitioners, and organizers to learn from and share with each other.
I was able to spend some time at the CA CLT Network on Thursday, and hear more from the growing number of community land trusts in the state about some of the opportunities and challenges they are facing.
I’ll hopefully spend more time next week sharing some of what I heard, but I thought I would take this as an opportunity to first share some very basic 101 on community land trusts.
Community land trusts (CLTs) are nonprofit organizations, governed by a board of CLT residents, community residents and public representatives, that take land off the market and use a ground lease to ensure permanent affordability.
As CLTs work to acquire and steward housing, often these projects require significant rehabilitation. While this can be costly, it also provides opportunities to decarbonize the homes and make them more efficient, green, healthy, and resilient. At least — that’s the theory. But in practice, it might be a lot harder to do that than we’d like, for many of the same reasons that replacing your broken gas water heater with an electric one is not always the easiest or most convenient quick fix.
This offers at least one entry point to think about the connection between the two goals of making housing permanently affordable and decarbonizing our homes — something that the private market alone won’t do. How could we make it easy for home retrofit and decarb funding to be readily available to housing that is acquired and preserved for community benefit?
And beyond just decarbonizing homes, we know that keeping people rooted, fighting displacement, and ensuring affordability are all crucial for community resilience in the face of climate impacts and disasters.
There are many strategies for thinking about how we, as the GND Coalition, can consider supporting CLTs across the state and I’ll hope to dive into those more next week. For now, I’ll leave you with a few good resources and articles you can read to learn more about community land trusts:
What is a Community Land Trust? — explainer from the California CLT Network
Beyond the Market: Housing Alternatives from the Grassroots (Dissent) — great article that describes the history and movements pushing for limited equity housing cooperatives and community land trusts
Organizers gather to hear about future site of an eco-village being developed by Richmond LAND
WHAT WE’RE READING
Resilient Roots and Canopies of Community Stewardship (Right to the City) — a newly released Land, Housing, and Climate Policy Platform by the Right to the City alliance, and a really important and helpful contribution to the current thinking on the intersection of housing & climate justice.
Could a community land trust help Chinatown stay affordable? Organizers are trying (LA Times) — very relevant piece about a community land trust that is working to preserve and manage affordable housing in LA Chinatown.
California Just Passed the First State Social Housing Legislation in the US (Jacobin) — recap of SB 555 and what’s next written by Richard Marcantonio from Public Advocates (shout out to him for coming to present at our coalition call this week!)
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We’ll be back with another newsletter next Friday morning. Please send any relevant topics, articles, reports, or intel to me at zach@apen4ej.org!
