Community Land Trusts: A Housing and Knowledge Commons

Political economist Elinor Ostrom is remembered for her Nobel Prize-winning research on the effective governance of the commons, which she defined as resources—like water and forests—that are shared and managed by a group.

This year, FLH program fellow Natalie Chyi and lawyer Dan Wu teamed up to apply Ostrom’s principles to the study of an emerging form of affordable housing: Community Land Trusts (CLTs).

A CLT is a nonprofit entity that holds and manages land for the benefit of a community, acting as a long-term steward of the land and the assets on it. The CLT model is a classic example of Ostrom’s idea of a commons, in which a valuable resource (such as real estate) is owned collectively by a community of individuals.

Chyi and Wu’s research, published as a chapter of Governing Smart Cities as Knowledge Commons (Cambridge University Press), explores how this housing model functions both as a housing commons and as a knowledge commons, in which information is a non-rivalrous shared resource that is collectively owned and managed by the community.

Read the research here.