Increasing Community Power and Health Through Community Land Trusts: A Report from Five Movement-Driven California CLTs

CLTs are positioned not only to address current racial and economic inequalities that have emerged during COVID-19, but to repair historic inequities that for generations have been perpetuated and enhanced through land ownership, land use and development practices. CLTs show the greatest promise to weave these goals together into a viable recovery strategy.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, residents and their allies across the state organized to address gentrification and protect their communities from displacement. They did so with the understanding that private speculation and the new wave of investment back into their neighborhoods will not benefit nor protect long-standing, low-income residents. In the process, they exposed the shortcomings of the existing infrastructure of land use and affordable housing, demonstrating the need for community-driven development. This moment of COVID-19 and the movement for community ownership led by Black, Latinx, indigenous, and immigrant people of color further exemplifies the urgency to locate a strategy that is both stabilizing and reparative, presenting a tangible and scalable strategy that builds community power among those who have been excluded from or displaced by the market.

This report was inspired by the resident-led efforts and collaboration of five grassroots community land trusts (CLTs) in California. Residents in five of The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities (BHC) sites – South Los Angeles, Oakland, Santa Ana, Sacramento, and Boyle Heights – have tirelessly organized to counter the racial and economic oppression and dispossession that has persisted in their communities across generations. Such conditions have made low-income neighborhoods and communities of color extremely vulnerable to gentrification and permanent displacement. Residents of each site independently recognized the CLT model as a place-based tool that will allow them to combine their shared values in building community power, collective decision-making, and equitable development. The promise of resident-led development on community-owned land in local contexts of disinvestment and displacement spurred the creation of a community land trust – T.R.U.S.T. South Los Angeles, Oakland Community Land Trust, THRIVE Santa Ana, Sacramento Community Land Trust, and Fideicomiso Comunitario Tierra Libre.