From their Southern roots in the Civil Rights movement to dynamic new efforts in diverse parts of the country, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) have proved to be a powerful means of combatting Black land loss and displacement, building community wealth, and strengthening community health and wellbeing. A recent LISC-led panel brought together leading CLT proponents to discuss the history of community land ownership in America, the rising movement today, and how CLTs are an imperative tool in the fight for economic, racial and environmental justice and equitable recovery from the pandemic.
Despite a two-month extension of the federal eviction moratorium announced August 3, 11 million people are still at risk of eviction and homelessness as they wait for states to disburse emergency rental assistance. The impending crisis reflects longstanding racial inequities, with Black families much more likely to face eviction than white families; Black, Indigenous and people of color more likely to be behind on rent; and more evictions filed in neighborhoods hardest-hit by COVID.
In addition to the urgent need for strong tenant protections and financial assistance to keep people housed, community land trusts (CLTs) and other community ownership models have emerged as a transformative strategy to advance an equitable recovery. CLTs shift properties out of predatory ownership that disproportionately drives evictions, and into community stewardship for preservation as permanently affordable housing. At the same time, historic uprisings for racial justice have increased calls for CLTs as a tool for shifting land, power and resources to BIPOC communities, and a fundamental element of reparations.
As interest in CLTs and other forms of community ownership grows, it is critical to lift up their history in movements for racial, economic, and environmental justice, and BIPOC-led organizations leading the way forward. The LISC Institute recently hosted a conversation with Shirley Sherrod, co-founder of the nation’s first CLT, New Communities, Inc., and CLT leaders from Baltimore, Houston, New York City, and Seattle, to reflect on how CLTs can combat Black land loss and displacement, build community wealth, and strengthen community health and wellbeing.
Panelists described how, across distinct local contexts, Black-led CLTs are advancing visions for equitable futures and repairing legacies of white supremacy and discriminatory policies governing land ownership. “The land that we’re on bears witness to this history of violence, but the land also bears witness to our resilience, our fight, our struggles, our demand for freedom and liberation from systems of oppression,” said moderator Athena Bernkopf, project director of the East Harlem El Barrio CLT, in introducing the session. “The land sees all of that both in the past and in the present, and will continue to bear witness to that in the future.”
Community safety and healing takes root through land stewardship in Georgia
New Communities grew out of Civil Rights organizing led by Charles and Shirley Sherrod, Slater King, and other organizers with the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education. As Shirley Sherrod reminded us, the work was extremely dangerous, and Black people attempting to register to vote or participate in Civil Rights meetings faced armed violence, disappearances, and evictions at the hands of white landowners and powerful sheriffs. The use of evictions as a tool of white supremacy prompted organizers to study collective land tenure models around the world to develop a strategy to prevent foreclosure and land loss—“the Achilles heel of Southern Black people over the years,” in the words of their report on the subject—and serve as a base for economic and political growth and security for rural Black communities. In 1969, the nonprofit New Communities land trust formed to hold land and steward it for community benefit, with families invited to live, work and farm on the land.
Through intensive organizing and fundraising, New Communities was able to buy nearly 6,000 acres of land, and won a $100,000 planning grant from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity to carry out an intensive community visioning and design process to develop a comprehensive plan for the land. The plan included community-designed housing, transit connections, an education system and university, a health center, a cooperative grocery store, and childcare center, in addition to collectively-owned farmland. However, violent opposition from white landowners mobilized Georgia governor Lester Maddox to block additional federal funds promised to the project, and New Communities could not fully implement its plans.
Organizers successfully farmed the land from 1969 until the early 1980’s, generating enough revenue to pay the mortgage, until a severe drought hit and devastated their crops. Denied an emergency USDA loan even as neighboring white farmers were approved, New Communities lost the land to foreclosure in 1985. “This is how Black farmers have lost land through the years,” said Sherrod, citing the well-documented history of USDA loan discrimination that drove Black farmers to lose 80 percent of their land between 1910 and 2007. “It’s hard to explain what effect that has on you when you’ve put so much into this effort. It took my husband quite a while to really get past it.”
Over a decade after New Communities lost its land to foreclosure, thousands of Black farmers sued the USDA for discrimination in Pigford vs. Glickman and won $1 billion in the largest Civil Rights settlement in U.S. history. New Communities received the largest portion of the settlement, $12 million, which it used to buy 1,600 acres of former plantation land near Albany that once belonged to the wealthiest slave owner in Georgia.
Today, New Communities is continuing its work farming the land, providing training for local farmers, demonstration crops, and plans to develop a retreat center. “So much that we’re doing in this area is using the land trust we started back in 1969, training our people,” said Sherrod. “We look at the land we have now as a place for healing. It started as a slave plantation that was in the hands of a slave owner, and now it’s in the hands of the descendants of slaves. And we’re trying to do all of the right things for our people from there.”
City support seeds equitable asset building and community resilience in Houston
In Houston, a citywide CLT is fighting speculative development in the wake of climate disaster and advancing community wealth building through affordable homeownership. Ashley Allen, executive director of Houston CLT, explained how Hurricane Harvey devastated low-income and BIPOC homeowners who could not afford to repair and rebuild homes destroyed by the storm, while developers were able to buy up newly available land and build dense town homes unaffordable to community members. Concerned about rising housing costs and the ongoing impacts of the storm, and building on the work of historically Black neighborhoods that had been exploring CLTs as an anti-displacement tool for years, the City of Houston helped launch the Houston CLT in 2018 to promote long-term affordability across the city.
Houston CLT focuses on providing homes to buyers at 80% or less of Area Median Income (AMI)—though the average homeowners served is at 64% AMI—and currently stewards 42 homes acquired through its New Home Development Program and Homebuyer Choice Programs. The CLT provides homebuyer education and pre- and post-purchase support, including attorneys to make sure people understand what it means to be part of a CLT and have a will to ensure their home can be passed to their heirs, as part of the effort to create generational wealth.
CLT homebuyers finance their homes with mortgages of at least $70,000 from a CLT-approved lender, and down payment assistance grants of $100,000-150,000 toward their purchase to further reduce costs. “When we’re talking about liberation and really trying to create equity within the housing market, this is a way to do this,” said Allen. “Every single person that we’ve had in our program so far would never have been able to enter the housing market in a home that was of quality, that didn’t need major repairs, if it wasn’t for this program. So we are providing a pathway for a lot of families and individuals that normally wouldn’t have a pathway to homeownership.”
Multi-generational movement secures major CLT investments in Baltimore
Baltimore’s growing CLT movement is shaping a citywide agenda for fair development, grounded in multi-generational organizing. Noting the history of redlining and environmental racism that produced segregation and disinvestment in the city’s Black and brown communities, presenters from the South Baltimore CLT and SHARE Baltimore CLT network described community land ownership as fundamental to building community power and control over land use decisions. “We cannot control what we do not own,” said Meleny Thomas, executive director of the South Baltimore CLT.
Baltimore organizers have cultivated a landscape of organizing, policy advocacy, and capacity-building activities to strengthen CLTs as a tool for development without displacement. United Workers, which organizes people experiencing homelessness and day laborers, anchors citywide organizing around community ownership and ran a leadership school that helped lay the ground for this work. The Baltimore Fair Development Roundtable, meanwhile, leads citywide advocacy around shared policy priorities, coordinated a successful ballot initiative to create a Housing Trust Fund in 2016 and secured a major victory in 2018 with the approval of $20 million annually for the fund, with priority given to deep, permanent affordability.
To support Baltimore’s six emerging CLTs, the SHARE network facilitates shared capacity-building, operational and administrative support, and fundraising synergies between CLTs, as well as technical assistance for housing development. Across the three domains of organizing, advocacy, and capacity-building, Baltimore CLTs emphasized the importance of investing in BIPOC leadership and building power through collective ownership. “We believe in the collective power, wisdom, majesty of the individual members of the community, and that we can design what it is that needs to be done,” said Danise Jones-Dorsey, SHARE Baltimore chair.
South Baltimore CLT takes the lead from community members, especially local youth, who identified CLTs as a way to promote development without displacement and a just transition to zero waste in a neighborhood deeply impacted by environmental injustice, illegal dumping, and evictions. “To tackle these problems from the roots, the youth needed a team, a group that would be able to take in vacant land and turn it into affordable housing, thus creating ideas for what would be the South Baltimore Community Land Trust,” explained Carlos Sanchez, a high school sophomore and youth leader with South Baltimore CLT.
After forming in 2018, the South Baltimore CLT was one of three SHARE members to receive a $750,000 grant from the City of Baltimore earlier this year. The CLT plans to use the funds to support the development of its first homes, which will use passive design to lower energy costs and be affordable to homeowners at or below 50% AMI. The SHARE network has also secured a verbal commitment of $200,000 for its capacity-building work, and is working with the city to dedicate publicly owned land for CLTs. “We can’t do anything without access to land,” said Thomas. “We need to be able to have access to that land just as these other developers are able to do. We know what we need, and we want to be part of the development that we’re seeing around us.”
Envisioning Black futures and collective prosperity in Seattle
In Seattle, the Africatown CLT works to honor the Central District neighborhood as the historic heart of the Pacific Northwest’s Black community as well as a site for thriving Black futures. The CLT also works in coalition with King County Equity Now to advocate for Black land ownership and public investment in Black-led organizations as foundational pillar to racial equity. Echoing the importance of community leadership and comprehensive community visioning, Africatown CLT president and CEO K. Wyking Garrett said, “When we looked at the comprehensive plan for the city, I didn’t see my children in it, I didn’t see my peers or our community in it, so we initiated our own community-based planning process to write ourselves into the future. That became Black Seattle 2035, and the vision for Africatown CLT emerged prominently out of that.”
Founded in 2016, Africatown CLT has mobilized hundreds of Central District residents and volunteers, including through creative actions like temporary art installations and “Paint the Block” parties to project community visions onto underutilized and vacant sites. The CLT also created an equitable development framework to ensure that Black residents, businesses, and contractors participate in the economic opportunities created through development projects, from design to construction to tenant selection to the ownership structure.
Africatown CLT’s Liberty Bank Building project was completed in 2019, and provides 115 units of affordable housing and three commercial spaces prioritizing Black-owned businesses on the site of the first Black-owned bank in Washington State, which was founded in response to redlining and disinvestment. Other projects in the CLT’s pipeline include Africatown Plaza, which prompted the land trust’s formation and was the site of one of the earliest Imagine Africatown projections; slated to break ground later this year, the project will include 130 units of affordable housing over commercial space and Black contractors through the development process. Working with King County Equity Now during last summer’s uprisings for Black lives, Africatown CLT also won a commitment from the City of Seattle transfer a decommissioned fire station to the trust. Africatown CLT plans to repurpose the fire station into the William Grose Center for Cultural Innovation and Enterprise to incubate small businesses and entrepreneurship.
Reflecting on these accomplishments and several other planned Africatown developments, Garrett noted that high land costs as well as a lack of access to capital are still outpacing the CLT’s ability to scale, and stressed the need for bold investments in Black-led organizations and CLTs. “We need to continue to push for disruptive solutions when we talk about moving away from Jim Crow apartheid to a new normal rooted in equity,” said Garrett. “Government, public sector, private sector, philanthropy: there’s a new way that people can show up and be a part of building that new normal rooted in equity, because the previous status quo produced the conditions that we have today. We need everyone to let the community lead, and then show up and find new innovative solutions in how capital is deployed.”
Uniting homeowners and tenants for economic and racial justice in East New York
Drawing inspiration from other groups on the panel, a new CLT in East New York is connecting powerful neighborhood organizing with broader citywide movements for housing justice and cooperative development. The East New York CLT launched in early 2020 as a grassroots, Black and brown-led effort to preserve long-term affordability in a neighborhood that was devastated by the 2008 financial crisis and now faces gentrification pressures. “We are a community that has been heavily redlined,” said board chair Albert Scott. “We have been given subprime mortgages. We’ve seen the nefarious speculators and the deed thefts that has taken place in East New York. We see the CLT as a tool to fight back but also fight forward.” As the pandemic shut down New York City, East New York CLT quickly moved much of its organizing online and recruited over 20 longtime neighborhood residents as steering committee members to lead community education and outreach, advocacy, and planning efforts, as well as food distribution and connecting community members to information and resources.
These outreach efforts identified two key advocacy priorities to prevent speculative development in the wake of COVID: reforming the city’s property tax lien sale, which disproportionately harms Black and Latinx homeowners and fuels displacement, and repurposing vacant, publicly-owned land to meet community needs. East New York CLT convened a citywide coalition of groups to abolish the tax lien sale, and won major reforms to the process, including increased exemptions and a commitment from the city to explore alternative tax collection and property disposition strategies grounded in equity. Steering committee members surveyed over 250 city-owned vacant lots in East New York and began to identify community priorities for the sites, including permanently affordable housing, commercial space for small, Black-owned businesses, and green space. East New York CLT is also part of a coalition calling for a municipal public bank that can support community development lending to CLTs and other cooperative development models, and advance true ownership in BIPOC communities.
To support BIPOC-led organizations in scaling this work, panelists called for public and private investments in several core areas:
- Ongoing organizing, planning, and technical assistance to build community power to launch and sustain CLTs over multiple generations
- Policy advocacy and coalition-building to direct land and resources to CLTs, such as prioritizing CLTs in public land disposition and passing Community and Tenant Opportunity to Purchase policies
- Expanding access to low-cost, flexible capital for CLT land acquisition and development from public and private lenders, including through creating public banks to support increased CDFI lending
The innovations of Civil Rights organizers in developing a model of community land tenure to protect Black lives and create space to imagine, dream, and build thriving communities reminds us that the struggle for Black lives and liberation is inseparable from the struggle for Black land. This work requires bold investments in deep, multi-generational organizing and comprehensive community visioning; supportive policies that prioritize permanent affordability and meaningful community control; and resources to acquire land, implement community plans, and develop housing at the affordability levels that communities need. As Shirley Sherrod put it, “Real power is in the land. Let’s do all we can to acquire land for our people.”
Julia Duranti-Martínez, Senior Program Officer for Community Research & Impact
Prior to joining LISC, Julia (she/her) facilitated coalition organizing, advocacy and capacity-building with community land trusts in New York City, conducted collaborative community research in a self-built neighborhood in the Dominican Republic, and worked in Colombia providing human rights accompaniment, policy analysis, and popular education with communities resisting displacement and organizing for collective land rights. Julia has also worked in family and emergency services for Latinx immigrants in Portland, OR, and volunteered in Bolivia and Chile. She holds an M.S in Community and Regional Planning and an M.A in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.