This story is part of our end-of-year campaign celebrating how the CLT Center is working to serve the global CLT movement. This week, we’re highlighting:
Terra Nostra Press
Every movement needs memory.
Like the lands and homes that CLTs steward for present and future generations, the stories, ideas, and lessons that guide our work must also be held in trust. Since 2020, Terra Nostra Press has been the publishing home of the global CLT movement: documenting its evolution, capturing its experiments, and amplifying the voices of those who are managing community-owned land and building permanently affordable housing around the world.
Through books, reports, translations, and commentaries, Terra Nostra Press ensures that the hard-won knowledge of one generation becomes the starting point for the next. Its pages have carried the histories of pioneering CLTs, the reflections of movement leaders, and practical guidance that organizers everywhere rely on to adapt the model to their own realities.
A Living Library for a Global Movement
Terra Nostra Press is part of something larger: a knowledge ecosystem that keeps the CLT movement connected and self-aware. Just as CLTs protect land and steward buildings in perpetuity, Terra Nostra Press protects the movement’s collective wisdom, keeping it accessible, multilingual, and permanent. By documenting, publishing, and preserving essential knowledge, the CLT Center ensures that what is learned today will remain available for those who continue the work tomorrow.
Alongside the Press, the CLT Center’s online library gathers and preserves the movement’s collective memory. Together, these resources tell the story of a movement that learns through knowledge that is freely shared — a movement that values open access where practice, policy, and lived experience meet:
- A global CLT timeline tracing more than five decades of movement history
- A growing set of case studies from urban and rural CLTs worldwide
- Interviews with founders, residents, and reflective practitioners
- A curated collection of academic research
- A multilingual international CLT bibliography
- Manuals and guides for starting and sustaining CLTs
- A US state-by-state database of laws and policies supporting CLTs
- Reports and policy analyses
- A video library featuring lectures, conversations, and historical footage
Publishing the Practice
Since its inception, Terra Nostra Press has built a catalogue that bridges scholarship and practice, making complex ideas accessible to practitioners, residents, and researchers alike. This year marked an especially vibrant period of publication, with new and multilingual releases expanding the reach of the CLT movement:
- Our Land, Our Survival (October 2025)
- CLTs for India? An Exploration of the Community Land Trust Model for Indian Cities (October 2025)
- Preservar la vivienda asequible (September 2025; the Spanish edition of Preserving Affordable Homeownership, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy with research, writing, and editorial collaboration from the CLT Center)
- International Commentaries on Preserving Affordable Homeownership (May 2025, coordinated by the CLT Center and published by Lincoln Institute)
Looking ahead, Terra Nostra Press will collaborate with the American Bar Association in producing a collection of essays about CLTs previously published in law reviews and other scholarly journals. Scheduled for release in early 2026, this anthology will be a valuable resource for professors and students within the fields of law, city planning, and public policy.