Take the land out of a house price and see what is left. That is the whole idea, and it is older and better tested than most people realise.
A Community Land Trust separates land from buildings. The trust holds the land permanently; residents own or rent the structures on it. Because the land cost is removed from the equation, purchase prices drop by 70% or more. And because the trust keeps the land, the affordability does not evaporate on resale, which is where every other affordable-housing scheme I have looked at quietly falls over.
One more number, then I will stop. Rural community businesses built on CLT or community-ownership principles have a five-year survival rate of 97.5%, against around 50% for the typical SME. Market structures do not produce durability like that. Something else is going on, and the chapter goes into what.
Previously I wrote about the £540 billion blind spot, the constructed bank memo about correlated professional-class mortgage defaults. The obvious question after a piece like that is, so what do we do then. This is part of the answer, or at least a potential escape hatch, so long as the people managing these things are ethical, which is a hedge I make in the book as well and I am keeping it.
The connection to the mortgage problem is fairly direct. Chapter 7 describes what happens when professional earners lose income at the same time: negative equity, forced sales, and a political impossibility of letting the market clear. A household on CLT land does not carry the same exposure. Their housing cost is pegged to what they can afford, not to what a speculator will pay. When professional incomes contract, that is the difference between stability and crisis. Not for everyone, and not overnight. But structurally, the difference is real.
The model is not unique to any one country. Versions of it run across the UK, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere, adjusted to local property law. The scale it is heading towards in the UK, and the projections behind that, are in the chapter, and the projections are larger than you would guess.
CLTs sit second in a list of six institutions in Chapter 12, all of which share the same annoying property: they already exist, they already work, and almost nobody in a position of influence talks about them. Preston’s community wealth building was the first. The other four cover work, income, hiring, and health, and at least one of them will be new to you, I would guess. None of them needs inventing. They need adopting, and they need people to know they exist, which is roughly what the book is for.
This is from Chapter 12 of The Next Rung, my book on what AI displacement actually looks like from inside. It’s open for pre-order now: