Overview

When the first community land trusts (CLTs) began appearing in the United States during the 1970s, all were located in rural areas. By the 1980s and 1990s, this innovative form of tenure was spreading into cities, suburbs, and towns. Homeownership remained a priority for urban CLTs, but other applications got added to the mix: revitalizing distressed neighborhoods; preventing displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods; and developing multiple types of affordable housing beyond the detached, single-family houses that had been the programmatic focus of CLTs in more rural areas. Urban CLTs also went beyond housing. On scattered parcels of land which they owned and stewarded on a community's behalf, CLTs sponsored stores, restaurants, clinics, community centers, and facilities for other nonprofit organizations, providing a variety of goods and services for local residents. A few urban CLTs made lands available for greenhouses, community gardens, and commercial agriculture. Today, as community land trusts have spread far beyond the United States, most are urban. There are still countries where new CLTs are being formed in rural areas, but the greatest growth in the global CLT movement is occurring in the densely populated neighborhoods and inner-ring suburbs of cities. Most of this growth has happened in the Global North, with cities like Boston, Brussels, Denver, London, Montreal, and Toronto leading the way. More recently, urban CLTs have begun appearing in the Global South as well. The Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña in San Juan, Puerto Rico and the ongoing efforts to seed CLTs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro are pointing the way. Urban CLTs operate at the intersection of two world-wide movements for social change. The first is happening where people who occupy acreage under some form an informal landholding system are struggling to gain security of tenure. Many of these informal settlements are at the center or on the periphery of major cities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. CLTs are also aligned with a rising tide of advocacy around housing rights, happening in cities across the world. The strategies championed by this amorphous movement for a ""right to the city"" include rent control, the production of housing that remains permanently affordable, and resistance to the removal of classes and races from areas experiencing government investment in major infrastructure or private investment in upscale development. Urban issues and actions like these provided the backdrop for a collection of twenty-six original essays published by Terra Nostra Press, On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust.

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John Emmeus Davis is a founding partner of Burlington Associates in Community Development, a national consulting cooperative in the USA. He holds an MS and PhD from Cornell University and has taught housing policy and neighborhood planning at New Hampshire College, the University of Vermont, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served for ten years as the city's housing director in Burlington, Vermont under Mayors Bernie Sanders and Peter Clavelle. Community land trusts (CLTs) have been a prominent part of his professional practice and scholarly writing for 40 years. In addition to publishing a number of books and articles about CLTs, he was a co-producer for the documentary film, Arc of Justice. He is a co-director of the Center for CLT Innovation. (See also: https: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Emmeus_Davis) Line Algoed is a PhD researcher at Cosmopolis, Center for Urban Research at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels and a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. She works with the Caño Martín Peña CLT in Puerto Rico on international exchanges among communities involved in land struggles. She is also an Associate at the Center for CLT Innovation. Previously, Line was a World Habitat Awards Program Manager at BSHF (now World Habitat). She holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Leiden and an MA in Sociology from the London School of Economics. María E. Hernández-Torrales holds an LLM in environmental law from the Vermont Law School and an MA in Business Education from New York University. She studied for her undergraduate and Juris Doctor degrees at the University of Puerto Rico. Since 2005 she has been doing pro bono legal work for the Proyecto ENLACE and for the Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña. Since 2008, Hernández-Torrales has worked as an attorney and clinical professor at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law where she teaches the Community Economic Development Clinic.

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