Community Control

From shared meals to shared tools, cohousing offers a vision of lower-cost, community-centered living. While that vision is taking hold in the UK, communities in the US face barriers that drive up costs and limit who can participate.

A growing movement is reshaping how people work and live together. Our new Solidarity Corner column highlights these practices—and explains why they matter.

A dive into some promising new approaches to both funding community ownership and building out an ecosystem that supports its sustainability.

Here are the steps to having economies operated by stewardship, not speculation.

A temporary window of flexible funds in the early 2020s allowed many queer- and trans-led organizations to achieve long-held dreams of owning their own buildings and housing their members.

Tierra Colectiva, a community land trust in the Denver neighborhoods of Globeville and Elyria-Swansea, combines community organizing, traditional CLT development, and more unusual roles in a large affordable housing development.

The Naugatuck Valley Project grew out of factory closures and layoffs in the 1980s. But this interfaith and labor coalition also helped to not only found but sustain a group of affordable housing cooperatives in suburban Connecticut.

Sometimes disasters open a space for bigger and faster positive change. In Lahaina, Hawai’i, after the devastating fires in 2023, community leaders built on preexisting relationships to approach housing and land in new ways.

A conversation about what it means—or could mean—to have resident control over property management.

Kensington Corridor Trust manages dozens of properties, including affordable rental and commercial spaces, as part of its goal to revitalize the commercial corridor—but the group says who makes the decisions is more important than what decisions are made.

Each MINT sets its rental mix and target populations locally, but what they have in common is a focus on preventing displacement and capturing the benefits of rising property values for neighborhood residents.

Many resident ownership plans are thwarted by tight timelines and high-ticket upgrade needs. One mission-driven startup is testing a phased approach to transferring mobile home park ownership to residents without pricing them out.