omniharmonicCommunity Land Trusts
Community land trusts (CLTs) are nonprofit organizations that acquire and steward land in perpetuity for community benefit. The trust owns the land while individuals or organizations may own the buildings and improvements upon it. Through long-term ground leases with resale restrictions, CLTs ensure permanent affordability and prevent speculative extraction from land — one of the primary mechanisms through which wealth is concentrated and communities are displaced.
The significance of community land trusts lies in their challenge to the fundamental assumption that land should be treated as a commodity. Land is not produced by human labor; its value is created by community investment, ecological processes, and geographic circumstance. CLTs recognize this by removing land from the speculative market and placing it under democratic community governance. The model has been successfully implemented for affordable housing, community agriculture, commercial space for local enterprises, and ecological conservation.
Community land trusts embody commons-governance principles applied to the most fundamental resource: the land itself. They complement worker-cooperatives by democratizing land ownership alongside enterprise ownership, and they represent a key institution in any economic-democracy — ensuring that the platform upon which all economic activity occurs is governed by those who depend on it rather than by distant investors. As expressions of dual-power, CLTs build permanent community infrastructure that cannot be easily captured or displaced. Within regenerative-economics, they provide the stable territorial foundation for bioregional economies.