Communities of the Dispossessed or Technocratic Housing Nonprofits? Political Logics Animating Community Land Trusts across the American Southwest

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the political goals, frameworks, and practices of Community Land Trusts (CLTs) across the Southwest, in order to contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations about the potential cooptation of the CLT movement. In doing so, it contributes to the perennial question of how actors might challenge or subvert hegemonic systems without inadvertently reproducing or extending those systems.Community Land Trusts are community-led nonprofit organizations that remove land from speculative commodity markets and hold it in trust for community purposes; in this project, I focus on CLTs that create permanently affordable housing. Recent research suggests that the recent popularity of the model—especially among policymakers—has resulted in a number of CLTs that neglect community control and embrace the marketized aspects of the model (Davis 2010; DeFilippis et al 2018; DeFilippis et al 2019; Kruger et al 2020; Stromberg 2016). However, there are also a number of CLTs that are earnestly pursuing community control and political transformation (Bunce 2016; Hawkins-Simons and Axel-Lute 2015; Ramírez 2020; Sumner and Hughes 2021; Williams 2018). These seemingly disparate findings prompt vital empirical and theoretical questions: How should we make sense of the trajectory of the CLT field as a whole? Should the CLT model still be understood as a potentially useful tool for those seeking to address social problems and create alternative systems for distributing resources and power in the city? In this dissertation, I contribute to conversations around the trajectory of the CLT movement by providing a framework for making sense of the diverging political logics that animate organizations across my sample of Southwest CLTs. In Chapter 5, I describe two dominant political logics that shape the mission and activities of CLTs: an asset-based welfare logic that aligns with the hegemonic approach to poverty governance in the United States and a politically transformative redistributive/collectivist logic. In Chapter 6, I analyze CLTs in the Southwest with close ties to the state, as well as those that frequently rely on the asset-based welfare political logic. In doing so, I identify an area of possible cooptation that has been largely un-examined in prior scholarship—the core CLT value of stewardship—and explicate increasingly divergent understandings of the core CLT value of community control. Finally, in Chapter 7, I highlight CLTs that primarily operate on the redistributive/collectivist political logic. I argue that these organizations are both pursuing mainstreaming (Wittmayer et al 2021) and facilitating direct, collective local control among tenants at risk of immediate displacement. I analyze how this subset of CLTs navigate possible co-opting pressures by pairing the CLT model with housing co-operatives—allowing CLT staff to pursue community control and the cultural work of decommodification in their daily housing provision activities—and by anticipating and strategically managing tensions that incentivize conformity. Ultimately, I conclude that experimentation with the CLT model is not leading to straightforward cooptation of the CLT model but rather yielding a diverse array of organizations and a robust field of CLTs.