The Relationship Between Gentrification and Community Control, Organizational Goals, and Political Framing in Community Land Trusts

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2019
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Haverford College. Department of Political Science
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Abstract
Community land trusts (CLTs) are an alternative land tenure model in which ownership of buildings is separated from ownership of land—individuals own the buildings and the CLT retains ownership of the land. By taking land off the speculative market and applying retail restrictions, CLTs are often used as a strategy to provide affordable housing as well as space for small businesses, community gardens, and nonprofits (Gray 2008). Through community ownership, board structure, and resident engagement, CLTs can provide community control over land and development. Given this, the model has the potential to empower groups that have been denied control over neighborhoods through racist policies or market forces (Lowe and Thaden 2016, DeFilippis et al 2017). Additionally, CLTs have roots in anti-capitalist critique and the civil rights movement (Davis 2010). However, today, many CLT do not focus on community control or empowerment and are essentially “technocratic affordable housing policies” (DeFilippis 2017). In my thesis, I focus on three areas that affect the potential of a CLT to be an empowering organization—community control, beyond-housing goals, and political framing—by asking how responding to gentrification affects CLTs across these three areas. Through examination of eight CLTs, I conclude that, among my cases: --CLTs responding to gentrification are more likely to have strong community control than those not responding to gentrification, but that other factors including race, ideology of founders, and relationship to local government are also important components that affect levels of community control. --CLTs responding to gentrification tend to have beyond housing goals. Additionally, I found a relationship between high community control and beyond-housing goals. --All my cases have some aspects of affirmative framing and some also have aspects transformative framing (using Nancy Fraser’s framework of transformative and affirmative change). I do not find a clear relationship between responding to gentrification and having a more transformative framework; however, a few cases that do respond to gentrification and have relatively transformative frameworks demonstrate that responding to gentrification can be an important factor in cultivating a transformative framework. Speaking to the implications of my findings in terms of empowerment, I found that the potential for a CLT to be an empowering organization exists on a spectrum, and that, among among my cases, the CLTs on the empowering side of the spectrum tend to be those responding to gentrification.
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