This resource documents Canadian community land trust movement implementing commons-based land governance as alternative to private property and speculative real estate markets. CLTs separate land ownership (held by community trust) from building ownership (held by individuals or cooperatives), removing land from commodity markets while enabling affordable housing and community control. The trust holds land in perpetuity for community benefit, leasing to residents at affordable rates with resale restrictions preventing speculative profit. This creates permanent affordability rather than temporary subsidies, demonstrates commons governance at community scale, and shows how collective land stewardship can serve housing justice and community stability against displacement pressures.
Key Highlights
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Commons Land Governance: CLTs implement commons principles for land—collective ownership, participatory stewardship, community benefit orientation—showing how territories can be governed as shared resources rather than private commodities or state property.
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Permanent Affordability: By removing land from speculative markets through trust ownership, CLTs create housing affordability that persists across generations rather than temporary price controls that erode as markets appreciate and subsidies expire.
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Community Control: Trust governance typically includes residents, community members, and public interest representatives, ensuring that land use decisions serve community needs rather than investor profits or municipal development priorities alone.
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Displacement Resistance: CLTs protect communities from gentrification and displacement by creating housing immune to speculation, enabling long-term community stability where residents control land use rather than being subject to investor decisions.
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Ecological Stewardship: Beyond housing, CLTs can implement ecological land management—urban agriculture, watershed protection, habitat preservation—serving environmental goals alongside community stability.
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Proven Model: The Canadian network documents decades of functioning CLTs showing commons land governance works at meaningful scale, providing evidence rather than theoretical speculation about alternative property regimes.
Practical Applications
CLT model enables commons land governance:
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Communities can establish land trusts removing territory from speculative markets, creating permanent affordable housing while building capacity for collective land stewardship and participatory governance
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Housing cooperatives can partner with CLTs separating building from land ownership, enabling resident control of homes while community trust ensures land serves collective benefit rather than speculation
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Municipalities can support CLT development through land transfers or policy frameworks, using commons governance to achieve housing affordability and community stability goals conventional markets fail to provide
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Indigenous communities can adapt CLT structures for asserting land sovereignty and collective stewardship, though recognizing that settler legal frameworks of “trusts” differ from indigenous land relationships requiring culturally appropriate governance
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Researchers can study CLT governance, understanding how participatory land stewardship functions in practice including challenges around member engagement, decision-making, and balancing individual with collective interests
Connection With SuperBenefit
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Canadian CLTs demonstrate how commons governance operates at community scale for essential resources, providing proven model for SuperBenefit’s exploration of coordination primitives serving collective stewardship—showing that participatory governance of shared resources works in practice when structured around clear membership, collective benefit, and long-term orientation rather than short-term individual gain.
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The CLT emphasis on permanent affordability through removing resources from speculative markets resonates with SuperBenefit’s regenerative economics focus, demonstrating that genuine alternatives to extraction require structural changes preventing commodification rather than temporary interventions within market logics—suggesting that effective coordination should create commons rather than merely redistributing who profits from extraction.
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CLT network’s documentation of functioning examples validates SuperBenefit’s pattern-based approach learning from proven implementations, showing that coordination primitive development should draw on decades of commons governance experience rather than assuming blockchain represents entirely novel coordination requiring design from first principles—commons patterns work across contexts when adapted appropriately.
Related Concepts
- Community - Collective organizing and mutual support
- Coordination - Mechanisms for collective action
- Mutual Aid - Solidarity-based resource sharing
- Sustainability - Regenerative approaches to organizing
- Power - Distribution and transformation dynamics