Community land trusts
From Wikipedia:
“The community land trust (CLT) is a model of affordable housing and community development that has slowly spread throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom over the past 50 years. More recently, CLTs have begun to appear in the Global South as well.
“Community land trusts trace their conceptual history to England’s Garden Cities, India's Gramdan Movement, and Israel’s cooperative agricultural settlements, the moshavim. As Robert Swann and his co-authors noted in The Community Land Trust: A New Model for Land Tenure in America (1972):
"The ideas behind the community land trust...have historic roots" in the indigenous Americas, in pre-colonial Africa, and in ancient Chinese economic systems. Thus, "the goal is to 'restore' the land trust concept rather than initiate it."
“The first organization to be labeled with the term 'community land trust' in the USA, called New Communities, Inc., was founded with the purpose of helping African-American farmers in the rural South to gain access to farmland, to work it cooperatively, and to have security in the single-family and multi-family housing they planned to build.”
Creative land access partnerships
There are many versions of creative land access happening across the country and the world. Most of them are able to do so because of community building work that established trusting relationships with members. We were able to buy our farm by collaborating with others who have similar goals. There are many individuals and groups trying creative approaches to land access. We’ll dive further into this issue in the final section of this course.