By suzannei on August 25, 2010
Tags: green
Martin Large (Nailsworth LM) describes how Community Land Trusts are bringing social, cultural, economic and other benefits across the UK.
Securing affordable and open access to land is a live issue here in Stroud. Our local Community Land Trust (CLT), Gloucestershire Land for People has just announced a partnership with Kevin McLeod, presenter of Grand Designs of TV fame and who works for Hab Oakus Housing Association. This will develop the Cashes Green Hospital site into 79 homes, allotments and community facilities. And in the space of two weeks in July 2010, triggered by the auction of a wood near the town, Stroud Woodlands Co-op has started from scratch. Through 50 or so members’ investment, this will buy a three acre wood for conservation, forestry, picnics, fuel, crafts, education and amenity.
The values underpinning these examples arise from a long tradition that understands land as a common resource. Gerard Winstanley wrote in 1649 after the Diggers were evicted from St George’s Hill, Surrey, that ‘The earth shall become a common treasury to all, as it was first made and given to the sons of men.’ He was saying, like Ruskin, Gandhi, Ebenezer Howard and many Quakers, that because land is a shared resource, it should be a commons to be stewarded equitably by society rather than as a commodity to be bought and sold on the market. Treating land as a commodity results in debt, poverty, social exclusion and inequality. It was one key inflator that pumped up the casino financial system which crashed in 2007–9.
But what can we do in our, towns and villages? In 1997 there were over 90 empty town centre properties in Stroud. Many were owned by absentee property companies and kept empty by tax breaks and high rents. In 1999, a group of forty of us, needing to find a home for a drama school, secured an old church as a theatre – The SPACE – for the community. Through facilitation, visioning, raising loans and gifts; we created Stroud Common Wealth, a non-profit company to own The SPACE and other assets. We got our MP on board and persuaded the Council to sell the church to us instead of a furniture store. Later, at the invitation of the county economic development agency we developed a social enterprise centre which has helped many successful businesses get up and running.
But as property prices rocketed, the thorny question arose of how to secure land and property as community assets. A scholarship enabled me to research the dynamic CLT movement in America. This had successfully reinvented the land trusteeship ideas of Ruskin and others by separating the land value, which is stewarded as a commons by the CLT, from the house value, which is regarded as a commodity. Strikingly, in the recent crisis, practically no CLT homes were repossessed in the United States.
However, any kind of land reform in Britain is a huge challenge. I recalled Churchill’s 1910 election manifesto, The People’s Land which stated, ‘In this country we have long enjoyed the blessings of Free Trade and of untaxed bread and meat, but against these inestimable benefits we have the evils of an unreformed and vicious land system.’ Honouring this, when Stroud Common Wealth started a CLT to hold its assets, we called it Gloucestershire Land for People. Partly through our advocacy, the CLT is now defined in UK law as a corporate body “established for the express purpose of furthering the social, economic and environmental interests of a local community by acquiring and managing land and other assets in order…to provide a benefit to the local community [and] to ensure that the assets are not sold or developed except in a manner which the trust’s members think benefits the community”.
Pioneer CLTs are spreading the concept by meeting needs such as for affordable housing, workspaces, food growing, and energy schemes. The accompanying value shift, seeing land not as a commodity, but as a shared commons, may explain how Stroud Woodland Co-op raised the wood purchase money in only five days. There is emerging support for the right to decent, affordable, homes in inclusive neighbourhoods, and a growing recognition of how partnerships between housing associations, government and civil society bodies such as CLTs can work towards this. And, starting with a small project in one’s community, common wealth can be created for present and future generations.
For more information:
Common Wealth, (2010) Large, M – Chapter 10
www.communitylandtrust.org.uk
This article appears in issue 17 of QPSW newsletter Better World Economics
One Comment
Coincidentally, It was Wintanley who came to mind when I replied to Lord Wei’s call for reformers last week.
http://natwei.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/call-for-reformers/
I think yo may find people-centered economics has much in commun with your own advocacy.
“It is only when wealth begins to concentrate in the hands of a relative few at the expense of billions of others who are denied even a small share of finite wealth that trouble starts and physical, human suffering begins. It does not have to be this way. Massive greed and consequent massive human misery and suffering do not have to be accepted as a givens, unavoidable, intractable, irresolvable. Just changing the way business is done, if only by a few companies, can change the flow of wealth, ease and eliminate poverty, and leave us all with something better to worry about. Basic human needs such as food and shelter are fundamental human rights; there are more than enough resources available to go around–if we can just figure out how to share. It cannot be “Me first, mine first”; rather, “Me, too” is more the order of the day.”