Metropolitics

The Fight for Community Ownership in Los Angeles Chinatown via the LA Chinatown CLT

Amy Zhou — 2025-07-08T05:00:00Z

Community land trusts are one strategy to stem displacement due to real-estate speculation in Chinatowns across North America. Yet, as Amy Zhou demonstrates through her work with the LA Chinatown Community Land Trust, these efforts must address multiple challenges to realize the potential of community ownership.
Over the past few years, the community land trust (CLT) movement has held a significant amount of attention across North America, and particularly in a number of Chinatowns, including

- From the Field / community land trusts, Chinatown, displacement, real estate, property ownership, United States, community organizing, Los Angeles

Fighting for Housing Justice: An Interview with Two Youth Organizers in Curtis Bay, Baltimore

Nicole Fabricant & Carlos Sanchez & Terriq Thompson — 2021-03-16T06:00:00Z

Two Baltimore youth organizers discuss the importance of community land trusts, for housing and beyond.
---- Series: Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research Free Your Voice began as an informal after-school program inside Baltimore's Benjamin Franklin High School. It has evolved into a powerful youth-led movement to end incineration, build community land trusts, and push for zero waste and just transition in Baltimore.
The group organized between 2012 and

- Interviews / community land trusts, community organizing, activism, mobilization, youth, youth organizing, housing, affordable housing, housing justice, Baltimore, United States, Maryland, land use, land rights

The House is Ours: How Moms 4 Housing Challenged the Private-Property Paradigm

Lauren Everett — 2020-10-06T05:00:00Z

In the midst of a global housing affordability crisis that has been heightened by the Covid‑19 pandemic, it is time to reconsider how the right to profit from property ownership is privileged in policy, funding, and ideology in the United States. Oakland-based Moms 4 Housing's bold direct action presented a concrete challenge to the status quo.
On November 18, 2019, in west Oakland, California, Dominique Walker and Sameerah Karim started moving their families into the vacant three-bedroom

- Essays / housing, affordable housing, community land trusts, property ownership, property, homeownership, private property, real estate, speculation, California, United States, Oakland

Community Movements and Housing Liberalism: Reflections on the Bank of America Low‑Income Housing Competition

Avi Garelick — 2019-10-15T05:00:00Z

Avi Garelick describes how the imperative for realism in affordable housing production conflicts with the goals of a community-based movement for housing justice and control.
The movement for low-income housing in the United States traditionally has been dominated by liberalism. Top-down, centralized institutions led by experts and insulated from grassroots political pressure have managed the project of developing below-market housing stock. In many cities in the 1970s, however, a

- From the Field / affordable housing, housing, community land trusts, community, community organizing, housing justice, New York, Manhattan, United States, Washington Heights

Can the Commons Pave the Way to Greater Land Security?

Irène Salenson & Claire Simonneau & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-06-22T05:00:00Z

Experiences of collective forms of ownership, based on the concept of the commons, have flourished throughout the world. Irène Salenson and Claire Simonneau ask what opportunities they offer for reducing the precarity of the most disadvantaged city dwellers in the Global South.
---- Series: Land Rights in the Urban Global South. Regularization and Land-Ownership Policies in Low-Income Neighbourhoods A large proportion of urbanites in the Global South live in informal neighbourhoods – around a

- Debates / property, land, Africa, Global South, community land trusts, Latin America, land tenure, land rights, property ownership, land use, land insecurity, land regularization, commons, land commons, urban land commons

Where Does Public Land Come From? Municipalization and Privatization Debates

Oksana Mironova & Samuel Stein — 2018-03-06T06:00:00Z

This article illuminates contemporary land-use and disposition struggles in New York City by tracing the history of land's passage between the private and public realms. The authors contend that government and community-controlled nonprofit organizations should govern the disposition of the city's remaining public land supply, deliberately deploying this scarce resource to promote the well-being of the people and neighborhoods most at risk in a speculation-fueled real-estate environment.
For

- Debates / land, New York, privatization, community land trusts, tax-lien sales, public land, municipalization, land use

Overcoming the “Scalar Stalemate” in Community Development

Evan Casper-Futterman — 2016-10-14T12:05:22Z

When urban practitioners undertake local projects, they are often working not only to achieve material gains in economically distressed neighborhoods but also to promote democracy, cooperation, equity, justice, and mutualism. Yet the existence of this strong set of counterhegemonic principles uniting community land trusts, cooperative enterprises, and credit unions also creates tension around the question of how to scale them up and increase their impact. In this essay, Evan Casper-Futterman

- Essays / community land trusts, community development, scale, cooperative enterprises, credit unions

Interrupting Inequality: Crisis and Opportunity in Low-Income Housing Policy

Susan Saegert — 2015-01-26T05:50:00Z

Inequality in the United States is deeply rooted in issues of property ownership, wealth, race and class. Lower-income and minority households in the United States are constantly challenged in their struggle for decent stable housing by unaffordability and insecurity, exacerbated by the twin foreclosure and financial crises and its aftermath. Community land trusts seem to offer an alternative that can interrupt the cycle of crisis for both households and communities.
Inequality, property and

- Debates / homeownership, financial crisis, housing, housing policy, inequalities, United States, land, New York, crisis, rental, foreclosure, housing crisis, community land trusts, rent, rental housing, affordable housing