Can We Say Too Much About Community Land Trusts for Affordable Housing?

Actually, we don’t really feel we can say too much about the potential of Community Land trusts.

Just at the moment, virtually all national governments around the world seem far more concerned about avoiding the potential market crisis that may occur should the free housing market bubble burst. Not surprising, perhaps, that authorities are preoccupied by the spectre of shattered piggy banks belonging to everyone from billionaires down to moms and pops struggling to manage the mortgage.

As a result, most schemes to tackle affordable housing turn on methods of injecting more and more money into the housing market. Grants or tax credits to builders that allow them to build unaffordable houses at affordable prices. Rent vouchers to low-income individuals that allow them to rent unaffordable apartments at affordable prices. As the government injects cash into the housing market to support it, that money helps house and land prices to spiral higher and higher, requiring more and more subsidies. Ultimately, this subsidization comes from taxpayer pockets.

Land trusts are one of the few affordable housing initiatives that attempt to ‘stop the merry-go-round’ by taking land out of the free market. Whether gifted, appropriated, purchased, or provided on long term lease, this land is managed in trust by an organization such as a non-profit.  The trustee pledges to hold increases in the price of the land to cover the rises in the admin and caretaking costs, not galloping free market speculation.

For an exploration of the growth of community land trust projects in the United States¹ read more in The National: US land trusts pave way to affordable housing

1. Regardless of Land Trust developments that may have been linked to the civil rights movement, note that Land Trusts themselves have a long, rich international history and have been a part of British (and therefore U.S.) common law since the reign of King Henry VIII.