Community Land Trusts

I looked at Community Land Trusts as a form of social housing that solves rational choice collective action problems for communities of lower income.

Full thesis abstract: The United States faces a crisis of affordable and stable housing. Even when either state or charity solves the affordability crisis, they fail to ensure stability and, by extension, cultivate community. The lack of housing security and neighborhood affinity means lower-income communities have trouble acquiring some benefits that higher-income ones easily acquire. Some affordable housing models, however, such as Community Land Trusts (CLTs), place a premium on community building and enduring benefits and therefore merit more political and academic inquiry than they currently receive. This thesis will explore Community Land Trusts and their unique ability to provide some of the ancillary community goods usually arrogated for high-income areas and communities. These include the provision of private individual labor for collective community benefit and increased disposition to engage in the mutual give-and-take required for the utilization of social capital. This thesis first offers a theory for how CLTs provide ancillary benefits for their residents drawing on neighborhood behavioral economics. It then supports that theory with existing data from residents and the testimony of several CLT staff members and concludes with a proposal of a research design to more precisely evaluate the relationship between CLTs and communal goods. I find that the CLT model offers valuable neighborhood qualities to its residents that allow them to escape collective action problems, enabling them to enjoy in the production and consumption of communal goods. This and other conclusions presented here should be of interest to housing and community development advocates alongside policy-involved personnel focused on their agency’s department bottom line but concerned with their products’ community impacts.