Collaborative Research: The Scale of Governance in the Regulation of Land in Community Land Trusts

Addressing housing needs of all citizens and scientifically understanding the implications and impacts of various approaches to affordable housing provision provides a major challenge for urban policy. Community Land Trusts (CLTs) offer one strategy that is increasingly adopted in the housing policy realm. This project will address the question of how the geographical scale of a Community Land Trust affects its relationships in regional land and housing governance including interactions with other non-profit and government agencies, and its geographical identity. CLTs are private, not-for-profit organizations that own residential land in trust for a community, and are defined by membership and geographical boundaries at varying scales, from the sub-neighborhood to the urban region. CLTs offer long-term renewable leases for the use of their land to members, who in turn own the homes built on that land. A grassroots approach, CLTs initially developed in particular urban neighborhoods, but they are increasingly expanding their territories to cover large geographical areas, such as an entire city or county. Since CLTs are a potential and growing vehicle for supporting community-led redevelopment, their successes and failures have public policy implications. The project will offer insights about how CLTs relate to various levels of government as well as to their members, in geographically dispersed land trusts. Consequently, it will enhance understandings of urban development, community identity, and land regulation. The researchers will develop local and national advisory committees drawn from policy makers in CLTs and relevant government and non-profit institutions in order to drawn upon insights from, and disseminate research findings to, individuals and organizations working within and with housing-oriented community land trusts.

The project examines the importance of law and public policy in shaping land governance and the impacts on residents' perceptions of place and community. Through a combination of archival research, semi-structured interviews and roving interviews, the researchers will explore how community land trusts are structured legally, socially, and geographically. They examine the relationships of CLTs with members and non-members within the CLTs' territories as well as their relationships with local, regional, and federal governments. A case study of five CLTs within the Minneapolis - St. Paul metropolitan area allows for examination of the different ways that geography affects community identity and land use governance in CLTs, because the five CLTs vary in territorial extent. This comparison of neighborhood- and regional-scale impacts highlights the different ways that local and regional state institutions can engage with the project of CLT development with differential effects.