Community Land Trusts

Publications & Presentations

Community Land Trust Conference: Building Community... Learning Together
Date(s): August 17 - 19, 2005
Conference Outline and Handout Materials
This conference will bring together some 250 participants representing established and developing CLTs, banks, state housing finance agencies, community loan funds, housing developers, and other organizations from across the country. A wide range of informative workshops, panel discussions, speakers, and networking opportunities will allow CLTs, community development professionals and grassroots organizers to gain experience and knowledge from their peers and experienced trainers.

Community Land Trusts: Leasing Land for Affordable Housing
Author(s): Greenstein, Rosalind and Yesim Sungu-Eryilmaz
Publication Date: April 2005
For many households experiencing lagging wages or underemployment, the purchase and financing of a house is increasingly difficult. High land costs are another obstacle to developing and securing affordable housing for lower-income families in some markets. One way to address this second issue is to purchase a house without the land, and a community land trust (CLT) is one mechanism that allows this arrangement. This article reports on a roundtable attended by approximately 25 researchers, policy analysts,...

Leasing Public Land
Editor(s): Bourassa, Steven C. and Yu-Hung Hong
Publication Date: April 2003
Leasing public land has been advocated as a viable land tenure option for former socialist countries and other transitional economies. However, the debate about land tenure has been influenced more by ideology and preconceptions than by lessons drawn from careful study of existing leasehold systems. This new publication offers a thorough examination of public leasehold systems around the world and presents insightful recommendations for the future role of such systems. Leasehold is a flexible form of land t...

Myths and Realities of Public Land Leasing: Canberra and Hong Kong
Editor(s): Hong, Yu-Hung
Publication Date: March 1999
Many scholars and analysts have suggested that public leasehold systems could allow governments to benefit from a share of future increased land value. Some have even argued that other policy objectives, including stabilizing land prices, controlling land uses and facilitating land redevelopment, could also be achieved through public land leasing. Although these proposals are persuasive at the theoretical level, there is only limited evidence to prove that governments could achieve these policy goals in pra...

Farming Inside Cities
Editor(s): Kaufman, Jerry and Martin Bailkey
Publication Date: September 2000
Most people think of farming as an activity occurring almost exclusively on rural land. This report, however, takes a look at cities in the United States—especially those affected more substantially by economic changes and population losses over the past several decades—as a new and unconventional locus for for-market farming ventures. The setting for food growing in these cities is the abundant vacant land left in the wake of people and economic activities moving from central cities to the subu...

Opportunities and Risks of Capturing Land Values Under Hong Kong's Leasehold System
Editor(s): Hong, Yu-Hung and Alven H.S. Lam
Publication Date: November 1998
Hong Kong's land-leasing system empowers the government to exercise two important land policy measures-regulating land supply and capturing development windfalls. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the effectiveness of this leasehold system especially in the areas of capturing development gains for financing urban infrastructure. The portion of development profits captured by the government was measured through an analysis of the official lease-negotiation cases. An average of 39 percent of the increas...

Policies and Mechanisms on Land Value Capture
Editor(s): Lam, Alven H.S. and Steve Wei-cho Tsui
Publication Date: January 1998
This paper reviews government policies on capturing and distributing the profits of land value increase in Taiwan. Based on the political ideology of the country’s founding father, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the government adopted two groups of techniques to carry out value capture policies: land-related taxation and land use regulations. Land taxation techniques capture profits after land values had changed, while land use regulations capture the potential profits based on the predicted land value changes in the fut...