What Does Community Control Look like?

This dissertation explores the opportunities for, and limitations of, the community land trust (CLT) model for urban governance. It draws upon the theoretical lineages of urban geography, political geography, alternative and diverse economies, and ethics. The findings are based on a case study of Rondo Community Land Trust (RCLT) in Saint Paul, MN, where data were collected from semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and the archives of RCLT and Saint Paul news sources between 2014 and 2015. The typical CLT model utilizes a shared equity groundlease to allow low income people to own a home while the nonprofit CLT owns the land underneath. The groundlease involves a limited equity resale agreement, requiring homeowners to sell their homes at reduced prices to keep the homes affordable for the next homebuyer. Most CLTs also have a governing board structure requiring one-third of their board to be low income CLT homeowners, one-third residents living within the CLT service area, and one-third professional or public service representatives. Responding to the literatures on scale and governance, Chapter 2 suggests that organizations like CLTs that collectivize property rights can form a new scale of governance with their own authority. The metaphor of a woodworking shim is used to highlight the ways new scales of governance can be inserted between existing scales, potentially governing space differently than the state. To explore the ways governance operates through the CLT model, I conducted semi-structured interviews of 30 participants, including RCLT's board members, staff, and homeowners, as well as city officials who interact with RCLT, and residents and activists in their focus neighborhood. I also observed three board meetings and three new homeowner orientations and collected archives from RCLT, interview participants, and the Minnesota Historical Society, including meeting minutes, pamphlets, news articles, and various studies and development plans regarding the neighborhood. After transcribing the interviews, I developed codes in NVivo and used discourse analysis techniques to analyze the data. The CLT model was developed in rural Georgia during the Civil Rights movement with the explicit goal of cultivating "community control" of land and development for low income populations (especially people of color). "Community control" has been a goal and rallying cry of the left for decades, but there is no clear definition in the literature of what community control actually looks like. Chapter 3 develops a theory of community control as the outcome of the interaction between a place-based population and an institution with decision-making authority over a resource. The analysis shows that the resulting type of community control is dependent upon contextual factors and can change over time. In RCLT's case, the impending threat of commercial gentrification in the Rondo neighborhood inspired the mobilization of business owners along the neighborhood's commercial strip to propose research into the feasibility of a commercial land trust development. RCLT was willing to entertain the idea in part because of their historic ties to the Rondo neighborhood, their participatory board structure, and their need to diversify their project portfolio in response to funding austerity. The resulting development of a commercial land trust project represents a process of community control driven by local property owners with a vision for inclusive entrepreneurship and a thriving local economic environment in a historically Black neighborhood. Chapter 4 details how the CLT model allows for reproduction of ethics of respect and stewardship due to its shared equity groundlease structure and tripartite decision-making board. Responding to the literature on diverse economies and care, which draw attention to the importance of ethics in producing non-capitalist social and institutional interactions, this article shows that organizational structure can help reproduce ethics. Ethics of stewardship and respect were upheld through RCLT's shared equity ownership model and a diverse governing board, which reduce power disparities between low income people and other urban actors, resulting in long-term social support for low income homeowners and more inclusionary decision-making. RCLT's case illustrates that CLTs can facilitate more egalitarian urban power dynamics, provide support for low income people, and be a vessel for inclusive decision-making that can result in community-inspired development. The classic institutional characteristics of CLTs, the shared property ownership structure and the tripartite board, were found to encourage these outcomes in CLT governance.