Davis — The Community Land Trust Reader
John Emmeus Davis, ed., The Community Land Trust Reader (2010). Pre-reading note — not yet read.
Why This Book Matters
Davis is the central figure in CLT scholarship and practice. This anthology collects the foundational texts of the CLT movement — historical origins, legal structures, case studies, policy arguments — into a single reference. If you’re presenting a CLT model to anyone in the housing policy or community development world, this is the book they’ll assume you’ve read. It’s the field’s bible.
Connection to the Project
The vault already has a Community Land Trust concept note and the CLT-LEHC Hybrid model note. What the Reader provides is the genealogy — where CLTs came from (Robert Swann, the civil rights movement, New Communities Inc. in Georgia), how the legal structures evolved, what the early arguments for and against were, and how the model has been adapted across different contexts.
This matters for credibility and for avoiding reinvention. The CLT-LEHC hybrid Wellspring is designing needs to be grounded in what has already been tried, what worked, and what failed. Davis is where that institutional memory lives.
What to Read For
- The historical origins of CLTs in the civil rights movement and the connection to Black land access — essential for Durham context
- The evolution of ground lease terms and resale formulas — the specific legal mechanics that make permanent affordability work
- Case studies of CLT successes and failures — what structural features predicted durability?
- Davis’s own analytical framework for evaluating CLTs — how does he assess whether a CLT is achieving its mission?