A Move Away from American Individualism

In Community Land Trusts in the United States, Karen A. Gray describes the community land trust, a form of affordable housing for low-to-moderate income people facilitated by community ownership of land. In a classic Community Land Trust scenario, a low-income person or family will join the trust before purchainsc a house from the CLT while also leasing the land on which it stands. To avoid falling prey to the pitfalls of absentee landlords, “members must live in the houses, but may sell the home back to the CLT or to another low-income house” (Gray 69). For Gray, community land trusts differ from private property principally in that they bypass capitalist processes that seek to maximize profit above all else. As she puts it, “the key difference between these nonprofit developers and for-profit developers is the initial and perpetual affordability; for third-sector housing organizations, perpetual affordability is central to their work” (Gray 67.) Where for-profit developers must obviously consider profitability when designing affordable housers, the developers of community land trusts can focus solely on providing their communities with sustainable models of affordable housing.

The root of this distinction lies in the United States’ historic relationship with private property. Community trusts are innovative precisely because the concept of collective-owned land is so foreign to American society. Gray relates the American preoccupation with private property to capitalism’s emphasis on the individual: “The primary responsibility of the CLT membership organization is the community, not the individual homeowner, which is also a radical notion most Americans. The CLT must balance the need of he homeowner’s real estate investment with the need of the CLT to provide affordable homes for future residents” (Gray 69). If the concept of the Community Land Trust appears revolutionary, or even radical, to some, it is because it departs from an individualist approach central to the American ethos.

Nonetheless, Gray does not demand that the reader consider the Community Land Trust with rose-colored glasses. She discusses the aforementioned advantages of the Community Land Trust– it eliminates the greed-motivated evils of speculation, benefits the community at large rather than the individual homeowner as sole beneficiary by “growing the pie,” and also allows CLT homeowners to participate in and enjoy the distinctly American pride in home owning, “a symbol of ‘making it'”–but not without also acknowledging the model’s disadvantages (Gray 74). Interestingly, these disadvantages are largely philosophical, and return to that same American preoccupation with individualism. She refers to a 1996 study that indicates that “even community members and residents who initially seem to understand and agree with CLT’s philosophies still required reminding” (Gray 74). Moreover, although CLT’s can provide homeowners with a Western symbol of prestige that has far-reaching consequences (homeowners generally describe themselves as happier than non-renters and homeowner’s children are less likely to drop out of school and become teenage parents), Gray concedes that CLT’s do not fulfill all of an individual’s desires for home-ownership. “For example,” she elaborates, “many Americans use homeownership as a wealth generation vehicle and CLT’s limit this for their homeowners” (75). By not participating in the United States’ obsession with and reliance on private property, Community Land Trusts limit an individual’s ability to participate in the American Dream by pursuing conventional avenues dependent on concepts of private property.

Evidently, an examination of the comparative advantages of disadvantages of Community Land Trusts points to a larger problem of how to address a single issue (in this case, affordable housing) while working within a system of beliefs antagonistic to the resolution of that issue. Community Land Trusts are a bandaid solution, rather than a systemic overturn of Americans’ relationship to property. I was particularly struck by the disadvantages which concerned the individual motivations of the homeowner. Even for those who seek and benefit from affordable housing and community land trusts can find themselves struggling to confront their own deep-seated preoccupation with the individual, rather than the communal. I was reminded while reading this of a striking experience I had while staying overnight on a kibbutz. The residents of the kibbutz asked everyone present to label a sheet of paper with various concentric circles radiating out from the center. The innermost center was to represent our foremost concern, with the outer circles depicting our more peripheral concerns. Nearly every American placed themselves or their family at the center of the circle, whereas all of the residents of the kibbutz, including the children, placed the kibbutz itself at the innermost circle. It is difficult to acknowledge just how deeply American individualism and its historical relationship with private property has determined our conceptualization of the world, but the kibbutz experiment reminded me that a me-first attitude is not the natural human way to be, nor is it impossible to shake.