When so much about today’s world, shaped by the neoliberalism that has plagued us since the 1980s as mentioned in Gray’s piece, is focused on the individual experience, making private the social and economic struggles faced by the working class and people of color at the hand of capitalist forces, community land trusts provide alternative means through which we can develop our relationship to property.
At this point, the centrality of property ownership to one’s overall generation of wealth has been established– it’s why we witnessed an organized effort to block Black and Indigenous people from owning valuable plots of land/ property, as it would seem to dilute the ability for white people to maintain this distinction of wealth accumulation from marginalized groups. Yet rather than indoctrinating individual families or people into this system of wealth accumulation via home ownership, which only serves to reinforce the system’s validity, CLTs allow for the regeneration of not just the self, but the community as well. Unlike a few weeks ago, we’re not talking about property managers or landlords taking advantage of the people who need it most, but the community reinvesting in itself over generations.
Through my work at Right to the City, I’ve been lucky to come into contact with a number of CLTs, from Miami to Baltimore, and while affordable housing is obviously a central point of their projects, what is also revealed in their plans reflects a responsibility to attend to the needs of its community in a way that the surrounding government has failed to over generations. Just as the decay of a community takes place over decades of neglect, so too does its regeneration require rehabilitation over a long period of time, recalling the closing point of Angiotti’s piece.
I wish you’d say more! Obviously, I share your hopes for the community land trust model and appreciate its potential to be both an antidote to the already unequal system of private property AND a critique of it. If one believes that property is already immoral on Judeo-Christian moral grounds, the CLT helps solve the problem. And if one believes that property relations in the U.S. are already constructed on dispossession, denial of humanity, and violence toward people of color, then the CLT reformulates the human relationship to land and shelter. But if it’s so great, why is it not more popular? Does the world just need to know more about CLTs? Are people just delusional about the promises of capitalism and property ownership? Are we just afraid to imagine a new world?