Origins and Evolution of the Community Land Trust in the United States

The community land trust (CLT) was a long time coming. It took over thirty years for this new model of tenure, forged in the Civil Rights struggle in the American South, to become f irmly established and widely distributed across the landscape. The organization generally credited with being the first attempt to create a CLT, New Communities Inc., was founded in 1969. A decade later, only a handful of CLTs were operational, all of them in remote rural areas. Not until the turn of the century did the number and variety of CLTs reach the point where it was fair to speak of a CLT “movement,” although the model’s proponents had been brazenly using that term since the early 1980s. There are now over 260 CLTs in 46 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. CLTs have begun appearing in other countries as well, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, and England. New Communities did not sprout newly green and fully formed from the red clay of southwest Georgia without antecedent. It was a product of a fertile seedbed of theoretical ideas, practical experiments, and social movements built up over the span of a hundred years. Even after its appearance at New Communities, moreover, this fragile shoot required another decade of cultivation and hybridization before it was ready for wider adoption in cities, suburbs, and towns. As long as it took for the model to become a movement, therefore, it took even longer for the model itself to acquire the full complement of features of what is known today as the “classic CLT.” The story told here of the CLT’s origins and evolution will sort the model’s distinguishing characteristics into three clusters – ownership, organization, and operation – and then say how each of them came to be added to the definition and structure of the CLT over time. The reality was much messier, of course, with ideas and influences often leapfrogging the narrative boundaries between eras. History seldom unfolds as neatly in the living as it does in the telling.