Ownership is a Habit of Mind: How Community Land Trusts Expose Key Consensual Fictions of Urban Property

Community land trusts (“CLTs”) have garnered attention as a novel,non-state organizational mechanism for enabling permanentlyaffordable homeownership. In canonical form, they separatea home from the land upon which it sits, holding the land in trustand selling the home for its value without the land. Additionally,CLTs use ground lease restrictions to constrain the resale processand enforce long-term reproduction of affordability. Herein, weargue that given the “actually existing” character of CLT practices,the legal vocabulary CLTs use is not most directly nor most accu-rately descriptive. The nature of the present intervention is empha-tically not to say that CLTs have acted in bad faith; rather, weidentify a set of fictions about land and rights encoded into thelaw regarding real property. Our intervention highlights how thenature of these fictions theoretically constrains the power of cano-nical community land trusts to transform society and forces criticalreflection on specific financial strategies CLTs may attempt