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

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

Black Homeownership Under Racial Capitalism: A Review of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit

Hilary Botein — 2019-12-10T06:00:00Z

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's Race for Profit examines the urban homeownership programs of the 1960s and 1970s, and shows how they exploited rather than enriched black homeowners and communities, and set the stage for the retreat from racial liberalism.
In Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real-Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explores black urban homeownership in the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus on the public–private partnerships that facilitated

- Reviews / race, homeownership, property ownership, capitalism, United States, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Black women

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

Land Insecurity in Khartoum: When Land Titles Fail to Protect Against Public Predation

Alice Franck & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-06-06T05:00:00Z

The unstable economic and political context in Sudan has encouraged people to invest massively in land in urban areas. In Khartoum, the land rush concerns everyone, from the elite to the working classes – and, above all, the authorities, who maintain a stranglehold over these precious assets. Title deeds are regularly disputed, suggesting that land insecurity is on the increase.
---- Series: Land Rights in the Global South. Regularization and Land-Ownership Policies in Low-Income

- From the Field / property, land, Africa, Global South, insecurity, land tenure, land rights, land titles, property rights, property titles, property tenure, Khartoum, land titling, property ownership, public land, land use, title deeds, land insecurity, Sudan

Making Their Own History: Squatters on Manhattan's Lower East Side

Benjamin H. Shepard — 2017-12-19T06:00:00Z

During the 1970s, when Manhattan's Lower East Side was full of derelict real estate, activists laid claim to left-behind buildings and vacant lots. Over time, the squatters' challenge to conventional forms of property ownership endured, though in greatly modified forms. Benjamin Shepard reviews Amy Starecheski's oral history.
Amy Starecheski's Ours to Lose is a compelling oral history of the squatting movement in the Lower East Side of New York City in the years that it moved from conflict to

- Reviews / squat, New York, right to the city, vacant lots, property rights, squatters, Lower East Side, property ownership, community gardens