“Community Land Trusts keep the focus of development on the actual needs of a neighborhood”
“New York used to be a place where an average Joe could come to make it in the big city, but these days the average New Yorker struggles just to make rent.
In the face of rampant financial deregulation, austerity-driven social disinvestment, and vast income inequality, working-class New York families are often priced out of both the rental and mortgage markets, while gentrification eclipses blighted blocks with empty luxury towers. But now housing-justice activists want to seed the city with a new kind of urban homesteading: Community Land Trusts (CLT)—a model of collective ownership of housing on community-owned land.
Designed to encourage long-term social stability and foster political self-determination on the urban commons, CLTs develop property through a community-run organization, which is generally run by representatives from the community, sometimes along with the local government, and the private sector, independent of conventional government-based funding streams or commercial financing. The City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development recently launched a major new grant program, with over $1.6 million in seed funding for community-based organizations, to grow the Big Apple’s newest crop of CLTs….”
