The Needs of Humanity Must be Provided for by Those with Property

A Community land trust is a model with the foundational purpose of creating affordable housing for low to moderate income people through community ownership of the land. It was a concept that I was entirely unfamiliar with prior to this week’s readings, and one that is of particular relevance to people in NYC’s Lower East Side and San Francisco Bay Area, where prices of homes and rents have exponentially increased in the last few years, leaving many unable to afford housing in the area. Yet aside from these two notorious locations, a similar scenario is also increasingly playing out across the country, leaving many people priced out of the housing market where they live.  The Community Land Trust is a vehicle created to address this imbalance, and will play an ever-increasing role in the years to come. As Karen Gray made clear in her piece, Community Land Trusts in the United States, “nearly half of the current CLTs started in this century… [and] the number of CLTs has grown most rapidly in the last decade.”

Community Land Trusts are a manifestation of a mindset that stands in stark opposition to the unquenchable thirst for money & profit that dictate the lives of many in our current capitalistic economy. CLT’s place limits on people greed and ability to achieve colossal profits, in favor of the welfare of the people in the community and the environment. This innovative land ownership model replaces greed, corruption, and selfishness, with compassion, equality, and security.

The now fabled American founding father Thomas Paine, in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice, asserted that the land itself belongs to everyone, that it is the common property of the human race. The Earth, Paine argued, “in its natural uncultivated state…was the common property of the human race”. Yet, the notion of private ownership arose as a necessary result of the development of agriculture, which made it impossible to distinguish the possession of improvements to the land from the possession of the land itself. To this Paine proposed a detailed plan to tax land owners once per generation to pay for the needs of those who have no land. The resulting “National Fund” would fund universal old-age and disability pensions, as well as provide a fixed sum to all citizens upon reaching the age of 21. To Paine, private property was necessary, yet he also acknowledged that at the same time that the basic needs of all humanity must be provided for by those with property, who have originally taken it from the general public. This in some sense is their “payment” to non-property holders for the right to hold private property.

Thomas Paine’s late 18^th century Agrarian Justice underlines many of the modern discussions in countries around the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). The UBI is the idea that the government would provide every citizen regular payments in order to cover their basic needs, such as food, water, and shelter. The call for such a movement has emerged in response to the growing notion that “work” has monopolized so many aspects of human existence, the inability of many to acquire employment and/or physically perform labor, ever-rising rents, and the overarching threat of automation.  

Concepts such as Community Land Trusts and the Universal Basic Income are ideas that seemingly hold a much more permanent place in the horizon of humankind, promising to change the how society as we know it functions. With compassion at the center, these movements have the opportunity to bring about unparalleled positive change for both the Earth and humanity.