A Speech by John Emmeus Davis, given at the Midwest CLT Conference in Madison, Wisconsin on October 8, 2025
Introduction by Greg Rosenberg: Olivia Williams, the executive director of the Madison Area CLT and organizer of this year’s Midwest CLT Conference, asked John to give a speech at a luncheon on the first day of the conference about where the CLT movement has been, and where John thinks it might be going. John delivered his speech without notes, and what follows is a transcript of his remarks.
Greg Rosenberg and I were talking this morning. (I’m staying at his house. He is kindly hosting me.) He said, “What are you going to say today at the luncheon?” I answered, “Well, Olivia has asked me to look backwards and forwards at the trajectory of the CLT movement in the United States. Oh, by the way, I’ve only got twelve minutes to cover 50 years of history!”
I had to admit to Greg that I was more than a little intimidated by the idea of talking to you today because I’m a better teacher than preacher. I don’t have much experience or comfort in giving inspiring speeches to an audience like you. Particularly in a time when the federal government is descending into chaos and cruelty and corruption, it’s really hard to think about giving any sort of inspiring speech.
I would say, however, that what keeps me going is the work that you are doing and planning to do. I’m inspired by you. For me to talk about the movement that you are building, however, feels a little bit like someone who goes into a thrift store and buys military medals he didn’t earn. Me talking about your CLTs feels a bit like stolen valor.
Nevertheless, I’m going to do the best that I can, even though some nefarious individual seems to have stolen the teleprompter. I’ll just have to ramble on a bit.
I have three general observations to make about the trajectory of community land trusts in the United States. One, history matters. Secondly, growth happens even in the rockiest of soils. And perseverance wins even in the darkest of times.
Olivia alluded to my long-held interest in documenting the roots of the CLT. Greg mentioned that as well. Let me ask, how many of you attended the session yesterday about the CLT’s history? And how many of you have seen the documentary film Art of Justice?
Wow! I’m pleased to see so many hands. I won’t travel so far into the past today, but I urge you to hold onto those stories because history does matter. We need to recognize and remember the heroes who seeded the movement of which we are a part.
I have a favorite quote by Howard Zinn, the author of A People’s History of the United States:
“History is important. If you don’t know history, it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything.”
The current administration in Washington DC certainly knows that history matters. That’s why they’re attacking museums, archives, and libraries. That’s why they’re going to national parks and removing plaques that deign to mention enslaved people or stolen lands or the contributions of immigrants other than those “nice folks” from Northern Europe and England.
We who work with CLTs can’t let people in power revise our history or tell our story. We have to tell it ourselves. We have to preserve it ourselves. Because our shared history is one of the things that is going to help get us through the challenging days ahead.
The CLT is not a model that descended from on high. It bubbled up from below. It emerged out of the struggles and aspirations of African American civil rights leaders in southwest Georgia. It was refined over the next two decades by a motley collection of community organizers, citizen activists, Catholic workers, and nonprofit housers like many of you.
We need to remember what they did and to take inspiration from their stories of resistance and hope. We need these stories, we need these heroes because the work that we do is really hard – and likely to become harder in the next few years. Looking to the past can help to keep us going and help to keep us grounded in the values that called us to this model of tenure in the first place.
My own history, my own immersion in the CLT movement started in 1980 when I joined a dozen people in a church basement in Boston. We came together to talk about writing a second book about community land trusts. The first one had been published in 1972. The lead author was Bob Swann. That book had laid out the conceptual framework for a “new model of land tenure for America.” But it was more theoretical than practical. So we met in Boston to discuss writing a how-to guide for actually creating and running a community land trust.
We thought we’d be looking at exemplary cases and drawing practical lessons from CLTs in the field. There was onetiny problem. We couldn’t find many to write about. There was New Communities in southwest Georgia, but only a handful of other CLTs. All of them were in rural areas except for one urban CLT, the Community Land Cooperative of Cincinnati. And its entire portfolio consisted of a single, owner-occupied home.
In a sense, we found ourselves writing about a paper tiger. We talked confidently about community land trusts being a “movement,” but that was hyperbole at best — and maybe a bit of hubris. But we soldiered on. We got it done and managed to produce The Community Land Trust Handbook. It was published by Rodale Press in 1982.
Most of the illustrations were done by a wonderful artist, Bonnie Acker. I have a soft spot in my heart for that particular artist, because a few years later I was lucky enough to marry her.
Fast forward to 1992, when I first came to Madison and met Sol Levin at the Madison Area Community Land Trust. By then, there were nearly a hundred community land trusts in the United States! In a dozen years, we’d gone from half-a-dozen CLTs, when we were writing the Handbook, to almost a hundred in 1992.
That growth occurred during a really difficult time. What was happening in the 1980s?
You had hundreds of Savings and Loans that had failed because of fraud, because of deregulation, and because they had been making a lot of questionable loans. So other banks were scared into taking a hands-off approach to home mortgages. They were saying, “We don’t want to loan to folks in low-income neighborhoods or to folks who are living in community land trust homes. They’re risky. We don’t want to loan money to them.”
The affordability gap was widening. Homeownership rates were declining. People couldn’t afford to get into homes. Homelessness began appearing in the United States in large numbers for the first time since the Great Depression.
In Washington, Ronald Reagan had taken office as President. Right away his administration began defunding and removing many of the programs inherited from the New Deal and the Great Society. They were dismantling the social safety net that folks depended upon.
In the “Great Big, Beautiful Bill” of that era, the GOP took money away from food stamps, Medicaid, and services for the mentally ill. They took money away from housing and community development. And they gave most of that money to the military in the largest military build-up in our history.
So this was a pretty difficult time to try to do something like a community land trust. Maybe not as harsh a political environment as we are facing now, but the soil was pretty rocky. Despite that, community land trusts started to take root and started to proliferate.
By the time I got to Madison in 1992, there really was a “movement” in the making. It wasn’t just a hopeful aspiration. People like you had got out in the streets and neighborhoods and towns and started creating community land trusts. There was growth in spite of the economic and political environment in which they were working.
That difficult environment also had the effect of attracting an unexpected set of allies to our work: city officials. Who knew that our rather odd little model of tenure was going to catch the eye of cities, counties, and towns and get their support? But as the federal government withdrew from housing and withdrew from community development, municipalities suddenly said, “We’ve got to make sure that the little bit of money we’ve got left can’t be lost. If we’re going to invest in affordable housing and community revitalization, we can’t afford to see those dollars leave. We’ve gotta lock ’em in place.”
Later on, I began talking about “closing the hole in the leaky bucket of public policy.” In city after city, we never made much progress in solving the affordable housing problem because, as fast as we poured dollars into the top of the bucket, as fast as we created affordable units, we allowed them to leak out the bottom into the market.
Community land trusts were well-positioned to step up and say to cities, “Hey, we’ve got a solution to your problem. We can close the hole in your leaky bucket. We’ll work with you. We’ll work with CDCs. We’ll work with Habitat for Humanity and anyone else to create the units. But once you create them, what do CLTs do? We do stewardship. We stand behind the deal forever: protecting affordability; protecting the condition of the units; preventing displacement of people from their homes. Stewardship is what we do best.” All of a sudden, we had a handful cities, here and there, that started to work in partnership with community land trusts.
What began as a little trickle in the 1980s and early 1990s has now become something of a rushing stream. Most of you have received a copy of the report written by Kristin King-Ries and me, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy last year. What we documented in our report was the increasing number of cities, towns, counties, housing trust funds, public land banks, and other municipal entities that are making a commitment to long-term affordability when investing in housing. Many have also reached the point where they understand that there is no such thing as a “self-enforcing” covenant. To protect affordability, you have to have somebody standing behind the deal.
And that’s us. Stewardship is what we do better than anybody.
There are now something like 350 community land trusts in the United States. I won’t say such growth is entirely because we have cities and counties – and even some states – stepping up and partnering with CLTs. It still takes people like you doing the hard work of community organizing and doing the hard work of operating CLTs. But the support of governments below the federal level has certainly been a contributing factor.
Because of municipal support and because of the efforts of people like you, the number of CLTs has grown; the size of their service areas has grown; their portfolios have grown.
And their portfolios have become more diverse. CLTs are not just doing homeownership now. They’re also doing rental housing and homeless shelters and transitional housing and co-ops and condos. A lot of community land trusts are doing more than housing. They’re doing urban agriculture. They’re doing offices. They’re developing places for small business and facilities for other nonprofits. The diversification of the activities and portfolios of the country’s CLTs has become pretty significant.
The other major development that we noted in our report is the rise of coalitions like yours. That’s a very good thing, I believe. Looking to the years ahead, we will still need Grounded Solutions, but we are also going to need robust metro-wide CLT networks, statewide CLT networks, and regional CLT networks. We’re all in this together. The only way we’re going to get through the next few years of federal dysfunction is by a whole lot of peer support.
As we do that, as we work together to build and sustain a national CLT movement, don’t discount public officials. I have a number here that I found rather surprising. In the United States, as of 2022, there were 90,837 units of local government! These include city governments, town governments, county governments, and special districts for transportation, utilities, parks, and so on. All of these entities have resources. They’ve got land. They’ve got money. They’ve got regulatory powers that can help or hinder a CLT’s projects.
Now, I’m not saying that all of those 90,000 units of local government are going to be your buddies. They’re not all ready to step right up and be your friend. Some are; some aren’t. But when they’re not, you have to put on your community organizing hat. Local units of government are far more susceptible to pressure and persuasion than governments at the state or federal level.
I have to come to a close in a moment because I was told to talk quickly. I’ve probably gone over my allotted time already. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the International Center for CLTs.
Greg and I and our colleagues at the Center are pretty excited about what’s been happening outside of the United States. There are now as many community land trusts in other countries as here in the US. They take inspiration and information from all of you.
But they are also applying the model in new ways. They’re structuring CLTs in new ways. They’re organizing and engaging their communities in new ways. As our friend Jeff Corey used to say, they are “keeping the edges hot.”
There’s a lot we can learn from them, therefore, even as they continue to learn from us. Part of our mission at the CLT Center is to foster such cross-national fertilization and peer-to-peer interactions so that people can learn from each other.
There is another very important thing that we can learn from our colleagues in other countries: perseverance. On the CLT Center’s board of directors, we now have people from seven or eight different countries. We have a member on our board from Spain. We have a member on our board from South Africa. We have a member on our board from Brazil. Each country as gone through their own dark night of authoritarianism, similar to what is happening here.
The people on our board are too young to have been involved in resisting Franco in Spain, or organizing against apartheid in South Africa, or organizing against military dictatorships in Brazil. (On the other hand, a few of our colleagues in Brazil did live through the regime of Bolsonaro, often called the “South American Trump.” They had to endure that.)
But the vital contribution that our CLT colleagues are making right now is not resistance but rebuilding. They are helping to rebuild civil society and helping to rebuild democracy after the wave of authoritarianism receded from their shores.
That is what we will have to do. That’s the charge for CLTs and similar nonprofit organizations here in the US. We are going to be called upon to help rebuild civil society and our own communities after the chaos of the current era is over.
I began with a quote saying that history matters. I’m going to end with a quote affirming that perseverance wins, especially in the darkest of times.
A couple of weeks ago, the 80th General Assembly of the United Nations was held in New York City. Our President delivered a speech that can only be described as “bonkers.” Unfortunately, it overshadowed a more powerful opening speech by the UN’s Secretary General. As a youth in Portugal, António Guterres had lived under a dictatorship. Reflecting on that experience, he had this to say:
“Even in the bleakest hours, I discovered a truth that has never left me: power does not reside in the hands of those who dominate or divide. Real power resides in people, from our shared resolve to uphold dignity, to defend equality, to believe—fiercely—in our common humanity, and the potential of every human being.
I learned early to persevere. To speak out. To refuse to surrender, no matter the challenge, no matter the obstacle, no matter the hour. We must—and we will—overcome.”
Thank you.