- The housing crisis is a land crisis: a transatlantic exploration of Community Land Trusts, Lily Gordon Brown, Greater Manchester Housing Action 2022, £4
It is rare that the title of a publication promises so much and delivers so little. With the authoritative statement that ‘the housing crisis is a land crisis’, the reader could expect some explanation of what each crisis is, and some facts and figures to prove the point. Nothing like this is on offer. The only statistic in the whole pamphlet is the well-known and derided definition of ‘affordable housing’ being up to 80% of market rent. The author’s claim that ‘This pamphlet comes at a time when land is making its way back into public discourse’, (p1) immediately signals lazy contempt for the reader and for the subject matter.
The author states that the research basis of the pamphlet is informed by ‘ongoing academic debates’, and Footnote 1 refers to no fewer than ten publications, only two of which are dated and which between them name 24 authors. In fact, all the footnotes are sketchy and most sources lack publication dates so that any sense of chronology is lost, although we obviously know that Marx came before the 21st century radical geographer Brett Christopher. Even more frustrating is that the reader is given not the slightest idea about the history of the Community Land Trusts (CLTs) the pamphlet is meant to be about.
Nor does it help to refer to a debate about ‘primitive accumulation’ that footnotes (Capital Vol 1, p1139 (edition?)), with only a ten-word quote that primitive accumulation was not ‘the result of the capitalist mode of production but its starting point’. She wraps up this particular issue by citing David Harvey (no reference) saying, ‘Yet this conception – of enclosure as a one-off process required to kick off capitalist development – has been challenged and modified in recent decades. For David Harvey enclosures should be more accurately seen to retain a “continuous role and persistence” within the capitalist political economy. Harvey termed this enclosure “accumulation by dispossession” – capital accumulation occurs through the dispossession and privatisation of public, common property’. (p4)
Why does the author have to namecheck Marx and Harvey? Probably to give her pamphlet some theoretical gravitas. With the same vapid authority, she refers to Municipal Socialism, the 19th-century North American land reformer Henry George, the US Civil Rights Moment, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Small State, Big Society manifesto, self-help, Mutual Aid and Garden Cities. It may be said that this slim 22-page pamphlet has no space to explain all these references. This reviewer says that they are a waste of space and should have been left out to make room to properly address the title and explain why the housing crisis is a land crisis.
Community Land Trusts
- The pamphlet poses three questions, all unanswered:
- What are CLTs and where did they come from?
- What can CLTs offer us in our response to the land/housing crisis in the UK and the US?
- Do CLTs possess a ‘transformative potential’?
What are Community Land Trusts, and where did they come from?
A definition of CLTs is given on p7. ‘CLTs are typically predicated on geographical locations and contain a self-defined community. CLT’s main purpose is to buy and retain land in perpetuity. CLTs “separate the ownership of the buildings (any given buildings) from the land on which they stand” which is then owned collectively by the CLT. Most significantly, the land acquired by the CLT is permanently removed from the for-profit speculative market, usually through a renewable 99-year contract. Whilst the land is owned by the CLT, the buildings which sit upon it are leased to members of the community through owner-occupancy, rents or mutual living arrangements. Any profits derived from the leasing process are held as “social increment” and are to be re-invested back into the community’.
The author then describes two CLTs; the Granby 4 Streets CLT in Liverpool where, after many years of organising against the demolition of old housing, they salvaged 11 houses and a winter garden. She also describes the success of the London CLT which succeeded in acquiring enough land from the Greater London Authority to build 23 homes on a Mile End site in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets. This is a notable achievement considering that this is an urban area of London where property developers, aided by contracts with the local council, are demolishing council estates, ‘infilling’ green spaces and parks and refurbishing accommodation with a small percentage of ‘affordable housing’ while the rest is luxury development, often empty for years. However, those 23 homes – sold at a rate based on median incomes to local people – constituted just a fraction of the already minimal 30% ‘affordable housing’ on the Grade II listed site, a 19th century former workhouse and hospital; a further 58 homes for ‘low cost social rent’ are being managed by Peabody Housing Association. The vast majority of the housing on the 252-home site is being sold by Linden Homes at prices that start at £450,000 for a one-bedroom flat. The CLT – with prices starting at £130,000 – received more than 800 applications. However, the mortgage criteria for even a one-bedroom CLT flat required a household income of between £22,000 and £45,000. To provide the significant context – which this pamphlet does not – the Tower Hamlets housing waiting list stands at 21,349 as of October 2021 with an average waiting time of seven years. Around a fifth of households in the borough earn less than £15,000 a year.
What can CLTs offer us?
Clearly, for those who band together to raise money to buy land and pay for housing to take them out of the renters’ market, and into the property-owning class, CLTs are a way forward. Asking whether CLTs can substantially disrupt the ‘commodification of land’ by taking some off the market can equally be asked of the 65% of owner-occupied homes in the UK overall.1
Do CLTs possess a ‘transformative potential?
This is actually the key political question of the whole pamphlet because it is definitely concerned to make a political argument in favour of a section of the Labour Party represented today by Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, and Metro Mayor Steve Rotherham, who instituted the Liverpool Land Commission (p20). ‘Generation Left’ (p16) regrets that the element of social movements was absent in the Corbyn years: ‘The results of the 2019 election sent shockwaves through the left, especially those who’d fought so hard for a Labour victory’. (p18) The response is to encourage ‘socialism from below’ by an ‘interventionist approach to economic programming’, whereby communities and public institutions are in a stronger position to act’ (p19). The example of Preston, described in Paint your Town Red, is quoted as a model of ‘newly-formed relations of co-ownership between public institutions, the commons and third parties (such as trade unions)’. (p19)2
This then is the purpose of the pamphlet – to make the argument with the support of 60+ housing and climate justice organisations that Mayor Andy Burnham establish a Greater Manchester Land Commission which would enable a ‘transparent and participatory approach to managing public land’.
What crisis? The capitalist crisis
The ‘land crisis’ of the title is given no explanation here. This is inevitable because the crisis is actually a crisis of capitalism, where investment in land has become a recourse around the world for vast amounts of capital that has no other productive destination. This is a global crisis affecting land prices and consequently housing prices in every major city and their peripheries in the world. The pamphlet refers to land ownership ‘by a tiny minority’. (p1) This is misleading. The major land holders in the UK (outside the Crown Estate and the aristocracy which still own one third of UK land and shoreline) are the huge insurance companies and the pension funds of millions of British workers.
This land grab by financial interests has caused the price of land to rocket and developers are making massive profits from the boom. The value of land is published by The Department for Communities and Local Government Land Value Estimates which records the price per hectare of residential land. In 2019 land in Tower Hamlets was £39,885,000 per hectare, in Westminster £135,715,000 and Manchester residential land value stands at £2,130,000.3 For comparison, in Liverpool the Granby 4 Homes CLT acquired residential land costing £815,000 per hectare. But the author makes no point about the kind of political struggle that would be required to take on those with a vested interest in land worth millions and millions of pounds.
How to organise against the crisis
Communists support communities, families and individuals fighting for justice against powers that want to deprive them of housing by evictions, rent rises, promises of regeneration or other legal trickery. We work with all the housing campaigns we can. But this does not mean that we support disingenuous political programmes that are actually designed to bypass the capitalist state. Nor can we pretend that localism, as promoted by Preston Council, can solve the problems of the working class. They claim that they can build up the local economy by contracting out works and services to people in the locality rather than to the large companies based in London or elsewhere. But Bob (or Barbara) the builder from Preston must purchase construction materials from companies that are sourced globally and rely on supply chains controlled by a handful of multinationals. There is no possibility of developing a parallel localist economy in small island Britain. The banks, hedge funds and indeed the councils are caught up in a web of multinational finance chains.
The working class cannot be deceived by the posing of the Labour Party. In most London boroughs, local councils are selling off council housing and making deals with private development companies, driving working class communities out of London. Nor is it forgotten that the Labour’s position on austerity cuts to services, including free school dinners, day centres for the disabled and counselling for mental health, was an attack on the working class. When Corbyn ruled at the 2016 Labour Party Conference that making no council spending cuts or setting illegal budgets was a disciplinary offence, the energy seeped out of anti-austerity protest movements across the country.
The class struggle must be an international struggle
Mutual Aid and Self Help may be a temporary solution for a group of friends or a local community, but are no substitute for building a working-class movement against the capitalist state and the multinational companies it partners. If COP26 showed anything it showed that there are no national borders to capital. Huge amounts of money for investment are moving around the globe in the search for profits. At this time in the UK, it is being invested in land and driving up prices. In the poor countries the production and delivery of extractive mining products, lithium for electric devices and cheap food based on palm oil plantations all amount to a global world economy controlled by monopoly capitalism. This is not difficult to understand though often there is a reluctance to accept. But without this understanding the working class cannot move forward from capitalism. Lily Gordon Brown promotes a narrow and backward platform for the working class – and fails to do even that competently.
Susan Davidson
- Although the subtitle of this pamphlet is A transatlantic exploration of Community Land Trusts, the references to the history of CLTs in the US are brief and rely on informal chats so that no substantial understanding can be arrived at.
- Brown M and Jones R, Paint your town red: How Preston took back control and your town can too, Blackwell, May 2021
- Department for Communities and Local Government https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/land-value-estimates-for-policy-appraisal-2019
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 286 February/March 2022
