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Stephen Hill says citizen-inspired Community Land

Trusts are a visible sign of the publics frustration
with the market and affordable housing policies

An alternative approach

Who said: There are only two ways in

which people can acquire wealth. There is
production and there is plunder. I have
never used that word before. Production
is always beneficial. Plunder is always
pernicious, and its proceeds are either
monopolised by the few, or consumed
in the mere struggle for possession. We
are here to range defiantly on the side of
production, and to eliminate plunder as
an element in our social system
We have to face all the resources of a
great monopoly, (land), so ancient that it
has become almost venerable. We have
against us all the money power. We
(also) have to deal with the apathy
of all sections of the public.
It was Winston Churchill, speaking as a
junior government minister, over a century
ago, although he could be describing
New York or London today, with their
extraordinary levels of inflation and
speculation in land and housing markets.
This speech was certainly not populist,
nor an off-message outburst, but part
of a carefully promoted political platform
culminating in the Liberals 1909 Peoples
Budget, and on which the Liberal Party
won two general elections in 1910.
That Budget contained proposals
for a tax on land development profits,
and for annual land value taxation: both
considered essential to help eradicate
the structural causes of poverty, not just
moderate its effects.

Churchill and
property markets
Churchills preoccupation with the
function of land in a well-working society
and economy was central to my Churchill
Fellowship research in 10 North American
cities in 2014. As I set off to Boston, I
believed that markets did eventually
come back into the kind of balance with
the public interest that politicians usually
strive to achieve and the public feels is
reasonably acceptable, even if never
perfect or permanent.
The extreme highs and lows in markets
that still existed seven years after the
financial crisis and housing market crash
of 2006-08, and the deepening social
and economic inequalities that have
followed, was stretching that expectation,
but had not fully exhausted it.
But at a public meeting in Jamaica
Plain, South Boston, I saw the result of
taking such a benign and naive view.
The community organising body, Vide
Urbana, works with people being evicted
or foreclosed in a rental and lending
market that is almost entirely unregulated.
It connects people with legal support

from Harvard Law School to ensure that

landlords and lenders at least follow due
process, so that dispossessed people
have a better chance of a soft landing
that is not the street.
In a hot market like Boston, as in all
the other successful cities I visited,
the ordinary citizen has become little
more than the necessary medium to
sign a mortgage contract, or a tenancy
agreement for local and global
financial institutions to speculate in
prime and soon-to-be prime real estate.
The tenant or borrower is merely the
incidental collateral damage of their
activities. Vide Urbana, and other
organisations in the national Right to
the City campaign, provide a way for
angry citizens to have their voice heard,
exercise some leverage over local
politicians to act in their defence, and
increasingly to develop their own housing
solutions, including Community Land
Trusts (CLTs).
The Right to the City movement is now
trying to build solidarity between people
at the margins and the threatened middle
classes. As in the USA, so now in the UK,

k Messages from City Hall and community activists in Toronto

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the problem of housing affordability has

eventually been recognised as a matter
of social and economic significance that
affects everyone.

Well do it ourselves
I found inspiration from the indomitable
determination and perseverance of
citizens to take their own actions, in
the face of what often seem
overwhelming odds.
CLTs are being developed in hot
market areas, such as New York, Boston,
Los Angeles, San Francisco or Toronto,
in which the speculative value of land has
been extracted and tamed. Some are
already more than 50 years old. Through
citizen owned and managed trusts, the
rent or sale and resale prices of homes
are fixed to be permanently affordable,
determined by what people actually earn,
related to local area median incomes.
In cool markets, such as parts of
Cleveland, Ohio, with more homes than
people wanting to live in them, citizens
are deciding to stay put and are using
CLTs to rebuild their communities, to help
stabilise fragile local markets, and ensure
that, when markets do recover, those
who stayed do not then get priced-out
of the places they helped to recreate.
Citizen action helps to achieve
outcomes that serve the public
advantage in ways that the state could

never make happen, and often would

not even dare to offer. In both situations,
collaborations between the state and the
citizen can multiply the mutual benefits:
stable markets, predictable housing
costs, adaptable labour supply, improved
health, higher levels of disposable income
for spending in the local economy, and
sustained property tax revenues.

The sharing economy

CLTs were born through the Civil Rights
movement in the southern states in the
1960s, enabling African Americans to
control their own production of homes
and food. Since the financial crisis,
however, and in the rebuilding of the
post-crash economy, CLTs are now
seen as an important part of a much
wider movement to democratise the
production of goods and services. The
people-powered or sharing economy
now includes local food systems,
co-working hubs and cooperative
businesses, local banking institutions,
and peer-to-peer platforms.
This is not an anti-corporate
phenomenon, but an important way
of building greater resilience into the
economy as whole, at a time when
mainstream markets are highly volatile
and uncontrollable, and likely to remain
so. Cleveland City Councilman Joe
Cimperman welcomed delegates from

Power to influence
In my research interviews, there was widespread agreement that CLTs
(and other forms of citizen-inspired housing) have a vital political role:
provide solutions for policy and market failure
to champion principles of equitable development and land reform
plan for the way people want to live
work with the state to achieve more than either could on their own
increase the capacity of public bodies to bring about change for the
common good
protect the value of public subsidy and support
safeguard genuine and permanent affordability
offer social and technical innovation, and real choices in the housing market
humanise and democratise social and physical change
create more resilient and adaptive places through long-term vision
and responsibility
enable ordinary citizens to be recognised and valued as extraordinary
create new potential political leaders grounded in their experience of
urban governance.

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m Vida Urbana protesting in Boston

more than 200 CLTs to their 2014

national conference, with the words:
By taking the land out of the market and
educating and supporting homeowners,
CLTs have been creating stability in the
neighbourhood and a sense of security.
Stability is the foundation of a route out
of poverty. We wont be destroyed by
Wall Street again. They can do this
mad stuff if they have to, but they wont
destroy our lives again.

Spreading the message

In England and Wales, there are now 170
members of the National CLT Network;
over half that growth having come in
the past two years. They are mostly in
rural areas, tackling the challenges of
overall lack of supply and the purchase
of second and holiday homes. Rural
communities, councils and landowners
have combined in highly productive
partnerships to deliver homes affordable
to local people that would either never
have been built, or would have taken
much longer.
The network is running a two-year
urban programme supporting 20 urban
CLTs, with the Oak Foundation. It aims
to show what can be done by citizens,
ideally working with their local council, in
widely differing urban housing and labour
markets in England and Wales.
However, urban politicians are wary of
citizens who want to house themselves
or other members of their community.
The building of new homes has been
a rationed system of production since
the International Monetary Fund crisis
in 1976. Housing policy thus has, at its
heart, a queue management function and
mindset, periodically stimulating selected
parts of the demand side for short-term
political advantage. Citizens may feel
like an unnecessary complication simply
because they may disrupt established
relationships between councils, housing
associations and housebuilders.

Do CLTs matter?
Churchills basic proposition in his 1909
election pamphlet The Peoples Land was
that the civilization of modern states is
largely based on respect for the rights of
private propertythat respect cannot be
secured unless property is associated in
the minds of the great mass of the people

with ideas of justice and of reason The

best way to make private property secure
and respected is to bring the processes
by which it is gained into harmony with the
general interests of the public.
This feels like a time when the rights
and security of private property can
no longer rely unquestioningly on
commanding the respect and consent
of the great mass of the people. Yet,
property, especially land, is one of the
most powerful arenas for action by all
citizens, in whatever capacity political,
professional or personal to work for
the common good. The quality of our
public and private lives depends on how
land is owned, paid for and used.
My report makes three
recommendations: how to encourage a
wider public debate about the role of land
in serving the public advantage, how to
define and strengthen the public interest
role of professional bodies, and how to
give the demand side of housing markets
an effective voice in policymaking.
CLTs are a crystallisation of all three
propositions into small actions that can
happen in many places, but collectively
can bring about significant change. As in
all emergent systems, global actions are
informed by local intelligence.
CLTs are highly political in purpose, but
belong to neither the left nor the right.
They are both conservative in creating
and maintaining stable markets, but
radical in reforming the nature of land
ownership to serve primarily the common
good. They hold the promise of what
could be achieved if politicians could only
find the courage to harness the energy,
goodwill, good sense and integrity of
their citizens. b

More information
>
Stephen Hills report, Property, justice and
reason, part of his Churchill Fellowship
research, was published earlier this year
http://bit.ly/1LqErkQ

Stephen Hill MRICS is a planning

and development surveyor in private
practice and represents RICS on the UK
governments Housing Sounding Board.
The views in this article are his own
smdhill@gmail.com

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