Olivia Williams

2 Posts

Olivia R. Williams is an independent scholar and organizer living in a cooperative house in Madison, Wisconsin. She received a PhD in geography in 2017 from Florida State University with research on community land trusts, and currently serves on the board of Madison Area CLT. Olivia also works to sustain and promote group equity housing cooperatives through board work at North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO) Development Services and is actively developing a new model of community land investment and ownership with Ecovillagers Alliance.
A group of people gather outside an apartment complex to discuss community land trusts.
Community Development Field

Are We Diluting the Mission of Community Land Trusts?

August 30, 2019 | Olivia Williams

CLTs’ dependence on external grant funding to acquire land and maintain their operations make them particularly susceptible to mission drift. Coming in with this knowledge, organizers may still be able to use the tool adequately or opt for other collective land ownership strategy.

Community Control

Controlling Land Collectively: The CLT Ground Lease Reimagined

May 2, 2018 | Olivia Williams, James DeFilippis, Deborah Martin, Joseph Pierce, Richard Kruger and Azadeh Hadizadeh Esfahani

Community control often gets conflated with affordability for neighborhoods seeing rising prices, and it’s obviously good to make land stay affordable. But affordability is not the same as democratic decision-making.