Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: coho & Real Estate & clt's

[Strawnet (Strawnet]

Hi.
David Eisenberg adds his two cents again, this time on community land trusts.

Ryan O'Dowd wrote:
>just wondering loren, I was under the assumption that clt's were set up 
>to not only take land out of the speculation game, but also as a tool to 
>keep development away, keep the land as it currently is?  Here in Olympia 
>Wa. we use a land trust to keep ecological sensetive land, land.  
>Co-housing, however grovey an idea, dose not belong everywhere.

There are actually multiple purposes for clt's existence.  One is certainly
to keep land from being developed, and a clt is an important tool for this
purpose.  But they also have been used frequently as a way to control land
costs for development purposes, especially for urban affordable housing
projects.  One of the best uses has been acquiring burned out urban areas
through the process of eminant domain (right of government to appropriate
private property for public use) and creating a clt to hold the land for
community redevelopment with the local/neighborhood community actually owning
the land together through the clt.  Sometimes, the land can actually then be
used as an asset to leverage funds for affordable housing and other aspects
of community development.  Could be a way to do urban cohousing in areas
where other options don't exist.  I immediately think about gentrification
and the potential sort of elitist aspect of cohousing.  What about low-income
cohousing projects for inner city neighborhoods?  Does anyone think cohousing
would work for inner city folks?  But I digress . . . Back to clt's . . .
Community land trusts are a good mechanism for groups of people to hold land
for the purposes of conservation - of the nature of the property, of the
value, or of the use.  Enough for now on clt's.

I enjoy reading the cohousing list and I've been laying low in read only mode
due to major overload.  Much activity in the straw bale realm, and I'm
swamped.  But CoHo remains of great interest to me.

David Eisenberg