Clark Geographer/Professor Awarded National Science Foundation Grant
Thursday, October 23, 2014
The project – for which Clark received $89,252 of the grant money - will employ graduate students at both Clark and Florida State University as research assistants, and, potentially, undergraduate assistants at a later time.
“I am intrigued by the legal relations and mechanisms that underlie this structure,” said Martin. “Furthermore, CLTs are explicitly about community identity. I think the potential downside of larger CLTs is that they might not be able to create the strong community identity that they desire. That might actually limit their effectiveness in providing an affordable-housing model based on community support and cohesion.”
Martin says she initially became interested in CLTs because they represent an unusual land ownership model, that of community-owned land with privately-owned housing.
Community land trusts (CLTs) are private, not-for-profit organizations that own residential land in trust for a community defined by membership and geographical boundaries. Increasingly used to provide affordable housing, CLTs offer long-term renewable leases for the use of their land to members, who in turn own the homes built on that land. The CLT governing body is usually roughly divided between residents, community members (of the geographical area but not residents in the land trust itself) and other members.
Martin’s Focus
Martin’s team will focus its research on CLTs in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, which (as in the United States generally) operate at a wide range of geographical scales, from the sub-neighborhood to the urban region. Their spatial variety poses questions about the community identities that they produce, and the inter-institutional relationships their land-ownership model engenders.
Through a combination of archival research and semi-structured and roving interviews, the team will explore the relationships between:
• the geographic scale of a CLT in the Twin Cities area
• its engagement in regional land governance (including interactions with other non-profit and government agencies), and
• its geographical identity
The research will highlight how the meanings of community and property can be negotiated through public and private institutions at multiple scales. By attending to alternative governance structures of differently-scaled CLTs in a single region, the project will offer insights about urban development, community identity, and land regulation. Consequently, it will inform understandings of urban governance and land use policy, particularly housing land trust policies.
“This research draws upon my previous NSF-funded scholarship examining the socio-legal processes shaping land use and place meaning,” explains Martin. “It provides an opportunity to combine my interests in place identity with a better understanding of the legal and inter-governmental relationships shaping urban policies, in this case, affordable housing policies.”
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