Photo: Rebekah Azen

by Rebekah Zablud Azen

Luckily for me, I was rudely and unceremoniously thrown out of my long-term rental of twelve years for a minor infraction for which my dear puppy-dog was responsible. He had the good sense to bark at the new neighbor, a policeman, who, having the authority of law and finding no obstruction to bullying, threatened to shoot my dog. The landlord, being a true capitalist, scrambled to placate the policeman, and wasted no time in securing his rental property and possessions. I was told to “get rid of the dog” or vacate within a month. Having no rights as a renter, the decision was simple. Leave.

That was a year and a half ago. The departure forced me to examine my “homelessness,” a fact common amongst almost all people today; street people, renters, and so-called “homeowners,” the ones who owe a death-pledge, a mortgage. Homelessness is in reality a widespread phenomenon affecting not just street people, but anyone who doesn’t own a home and is vulnerable to losing their domicile. A renter is vulnerable to the vagaries of the landlord and can be given notice at any time. If a renter can’t pay the rent due to unemployment or illness, then he or she is evicted. As to most so-called “homeowners,” the real owner is typically the bank, or more likely, Wall Street, to whom the “homeowner” owes a lifetime debt. Should the “homeowner” fail to pay the mortgage due to the same causes of unemployment or illness, she or he will suffer the same consequences as the renter. The domicile is lost.

If the “homeowner” can suffer a lost domicile, in addition to the requisite servitude of a good 30 years, what security, what freedom from serfdom, what contentment, health, and peace, or more accurately, what sanity is there in traditional “homeownership?”

I had probably arrived, after many years of workplace struggle and career advancement where I could join my brethren in the all-American, race-to-indebtedness “homeowner” pursuit, but like so many things I’ve avoided, like pharmaceuticals, investments in corporate America, pesticides in my food, and cell phones, I decided it wasn’t a good deal. I just didn’t have the time at half a century, or money, but less so the inclination.

What I wanted and needed was a truly affordable home that I could quickly own outright so that I could obtain what I consider the necessities of life; freedom, security, and self-sufficiency – freedom from a lifetime of enforced workplace drudgery so that I might pursue loftier goals; freedom from enforced participation in an economic system I find reprehensible in its exploitation and destruction of the earth and its people; security against loss of a domicile; a secure place to retire when I am elderly; and the ability to obtain considerable sovereignty over my physical needs so as not to be completely dependent on corporate culture.

Far from being extravagant, these wants and needs are fundamental to life, and though they are my concerns, they are also the concerns of all people. All people should have time to pursue the things that matter to them in life and time to develop their abilities and higher nature. Everyone should have the freedom to pursue their livelihood in ways that are non-exploitative and non-destructive to the earth and her inhabitants. Everyone deserves a safe and secure home that no one can take away, whether in youth, middle age or old age. And everyone should have access to the natural resources of the earth to guarantee a basic level of self-sufficiency so as not to be dependent on, and controlled by others, such as the industrial food, financial, and energy industries.

These things: freedom, security, and self-sufficiency, are important and legitimate in any epoch but our generation is dealing with something more, much more. We are arriving at a time in history where the unnatural, antiquated, exploitative framework of private property and its sick progeny, capitalism, which has been generating the conditions of its own demise for centuries, has now reached its limits – the earth’s limits. Further expansion can only lead to collapse. We have overshot the earth’s limits with peak everything, resource depletion, and environmental degradation, of which climate change is just one calamitous, presently-unfolding manifestation.

To any observant individual, it is evident that Western civilization is tottering on the brink of collapse. An economic meltdown from any number of problems manifesting in the physical environment or elsewhere, all originating from the same unregulated “free market” system, will ensure widespread unemployment. Anyone without a job will certainly be without a home in no time flat. Our true state of homelessness, with all its accompanying ills, will soon become painfully apparent.

“Employment,” our modern notion of redemption and all things positive, is but a cover-up for what truly is…bankruptcy of the people who hold little but baubles, bells and trinkets. You can’t eat a DVD player, an automobile or a wardrobe, or stay warm from a T.V., a washer/dryer, or jewelry. These things don’t grow food or keep you sheltered from the cold, snow and rain. Most Americans today don’t even hold assets. What we hold and own are “negative assets;” debt. The great wealth we supposedly own is nothing more than a chimera, an illusion. It is not in our hands– it is in the hands of the wealthy few. Government assistance for the American people will be as rapid, life-saving, restorative and assuring as what we witnessed with Katrina and the Gulf Oil Spill, or looking back, the Depression years. We should know by now that the government has other priorities and it is not us.

There’s good reason as to why the term “employment” has so much prominence in the Western vocabulary. Wealth is generated through labor (otherwise known as employment), and requires land and capital of which the laborer has none. All the extractive industries – from landlords to employers, corporations, loan companies, mortgage companies, banks, insurance agencies, the financial industry, Wall Street, and Government – depend on your continual, uninterrupted employment. It is through labor that wealth is generated but it cannot accrue to the laborer because those who own the land and resources of production siphon the wealth off for themselves. If we stopped working, the rich couldn’t get any richer. Unemployment is considered extremely undesirable because the unemployed require support from the public coffers; money which could be “better” spent supporting capitalist development and more jobs to enrich the wealthy.

Economists talk about employment as if it is, and has forever been, the only avenue to obtaining the necessities of life but this is fallacious and misleading. Employment is a Johnny-Come-Lately. Its spouse (the two are inseparable), unemployment, or arbeitslosigkeit in German (union activity and socialism had deep roots in Germany), was a term rarely heard before the 1890’s. Employment/unemployment is a modern phenomenon that accompanies landlessness and the rise of industrial capitalism. The fact is that access to land and the resources of the earth, not employment, is what got humanity through the millennia.

To understand landlessness is to understand how the system works. It’s very simple. If people are deprived of land, they cannot obtain the necessities of existence from the earth that they have a natural right and inheritance to. Others control their existence by owning the land; therefore the landless have nothing but their labor to sell in order to survive. When employment ceases for whatever reason, the laborer is still landless and homeless. But as long as the system operates the laborer can conceivably find other employment.

When the system collapses however, there will be no employment to be had. And then it will be clearly seen that the people at large are destitute – they own and control absolutely nothing of value; neither land, nor the resources of production, which flow from land and labor. When the system collapses, it won’t be for the reason Karl Marx anticipated, that the proletariat rise up in resistance, but from its own weight, through centuries of conceited, rapacious, arrogant and ignorant conflict with the ways of the natural world, enthroned in land-grabbing economic institutions from Roman times to the present. Regardless of what triggers the collapse, we will all need shelter, warmth and sustenance.

So these were my personal motivations and reasons for finding an alternative to traditional “homeownership.” I wanted to find a way out for myself as well as a way “in” to something new, but what I discovered was far more than I ever expected. As I began to research, I put the pieces back together, beginning with the story of land, to explain why housing is so unaffordable today and why everyone is trapped in this no-win game. What I discovered for myself was obviously of concern and use to all people. The explanation and answers to our predicament are spelled out in this series of articles, and the methods are sound. Freedom, security, self-sufficiency and sovereignty can all be re-gained and re-claimed through the Community Land Trust model, use of the Sustainable Development Testing Site Act, and small, earthship-type homes.

We are heading down the proverbial rabbit hole and for all who sense the danger, it’s time, way beyond time to act. We are late for a very important date. My only regret is that I came to these realizations so late in life; not the fact of systemic collapse, but understanding the causes that are rooted in inequitable land tenure and the logical, unequivocal solutions, which proceed from that. The implications are immense and I can hardly do this matter justice in these few short pages. But I would like to touch on some important points.

The longer this economic system survives, the more serious are the consequences for the planet and all life. We should be cheering for its demise as soon as possible if we had any sense about us. The consequences of climate change are compounding by the minute and at some point, not far in the future, we are guaranteed catastrophic results capable of eliminating life on the planet.

Climate change is not, as some would like us to believe, an isolated environmental problem that exists independent of everything, not the least of which the economic system that causes it. It is an economic problem. It is a problem of capitalism. It cannot be resolved with politics and legislation. Governments exist to support capitalists and capitalism. That is their function. This is why no significant headway will ever be made by petitioning governments. True to their capitalist agenda, federal and state government has abdicated all responsibility for climate change. The gubernatorial candidates couldn’t even support a state greenhouse gas cap-and-trade rule, which is little more than a symbolic act meant to appease.

Politics is nothing more than a smokescreen and a diversion for the gullible masses. Power is derived not from politics but from economics and economic relations. Politics is its handmaiden. Republican or Democrat does not alter the fundamental dynamic. As long as those in power (economic power) can deceive us, they surely will, using the political system as bait, always leading us on a wild goose chase away from our own best interests.

The issue of climate change may seem obscure and irrelevant to some but it’s actually incredibly symbolic of our situation and extremely instructive. The privatization and commodification of land, better known as imperialism or colonialism, which creates the conditions for economic exploitation, culminating in the autarchic reaches of modern corporate capitalism, has been going on for centuries, but the affects were always localized, until the present. The displacement of people from their homelands and the resultant poverty, war, slave labor, and suffering, happened elsewhere, to other people, in South America, Asia or Africa, or we think that it happened “a long time ago” when the indigenous inhabitants were removed for the advancement of “civilization.” We don’t see the connection; that the sufferings that other people have endured through time are now our sufferings, from the same causes. Climate change didn’t spring out of nowhere. It is the end result of land grabbing, and the concomitant rise and ascendancy of capitalist economics. The chickens have all come home to roost.

There is no stopping climate change until capitalism stops. It’s a runaway train on a global scale and it’s pointless to talk about political action, the greening of the economy, emissions trading, cap and trade, regulating polluters, geo-engineering, taxing polluters, or other airy fairy ideas about how to stop it that don’t deal with the root of the problem, capitalism. As long as people are employed, which they have to be because everyone is now homeless and landless, and completely dependent on a job, we are rapidly creating the conditions of our own demise. No one, not even the best intentioned climate change activist, can step out of this imprisonment which keeps us enslaved to creating the conditions for our own massive suffering and probable extinction until she/he has an option to employment, to not be employed. Think of it. If the world’s people were not forced into factories and industrial economies on a daily basis, the conditions for climate change making would cease immediately. But that is not possible and will never be possible until the one thing that matters most changes, the ability of people to leave the industrial economy by way of securing land which provides the provisions of life….for housing, food, and warmth.

Capitalism is simply unsustainable and there is no way around this inconvenient truth. Capitalism is predicated on landlessness. No one works who doesn’t have to but the millions of landless around the world must to secure their daily bread. This is how profits are generated and how the whole cycle works. The system cannot stop or even slow down without manufacturing dire consequences, unemployment and rampant poverty. Production and consumption are intimately bound causing resource depletion, environmental degradation and pollution. Growth is unstoppable. It’s a cancer that no amount of tinkering can fix because the fundaments (unequal distribution of land) are wrong. They’re out of sync with natural law which has inviolable boundaries. The natural world does not create inequity. Man does.

We are caught in a vise. If the capitalist economy continues as it is for some time, we will suffer more severe consequences from climate change, until the results of that cause the system to collapse. If the economy collapses before the worst of climate change kicks in, it will be better for the long term survival of the planet at large, but we will have massive unemployment and homelessness, unprecedented suffering, and grave social chaos.

What to do? Forget about a movement. The masses are asleep and have long since forgotten about the history of enclosures in medieval Europe, the rise of socialism as a repudiation of the growing capitalist order, or the celebrated writings of Henry George. Forget about political action for forging some broad social mandate which can’t make a dent in this gargantuan life-destroying system.

The end product of capitalism is not material goods but material man, having consumed so much rubbish over the centuries, he is degraded, lost, unaware, and unconscious of his collective humanity and his place on earth. He is controllable and unable to know or serve his own best interests. Economic powers have him sold on “sustainability” to solve the problem of climate change; he can obsess over “personal” responsibility, hanging his clothes out to dry, putting a solar collector on his rooftop, and bicycling to work rather than start a revolution. The natural impulse of collective resistance to exploitation, dehumanization, and life threatening forces has been abducted.

Take charge of this situation yourself. No one is going to resolve this crisis for us. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Get ready. Step outside of capitalism. Step way outside of capitalism. Don’t just wade in “local living economies” and antiquated traditional market forces, the green economy, “natural” or “sustainable” capitalism, protest against hegemonic corporate and government rule, petitioning for regulatory “fixes,” fighting pervasive government in-action, orthodoxy and apathy, or any other “solutions” that don’t leave capitalism in the dust or its compadre, socialism (owning the means of production to pollute and exploit just as thoroughly will not help us out of this crisis).

Start a Community Land Trust to create self-sufficiency and survival in these tumultuous, radically changing times. Show others the way out and forward. Change the fundamental equation of economics for good…an economics in sync and not opposed to natural law and the natural order….an economics starting from the ground up with the equitable distribution and communal control of land taken out of the market forever. There is no other way. Take the land back. Give the land back. Bring us back to who we are. One with the land. One with life. Equality and well-being for all.

* If anyone has land to donate for an emerging rural, self-sufficient, sustainable CLT, please contact Rebekah (contact info below).

This article is also available online at The Santa Fe New Mexican website http://www.santafegreenline.com/

Rebekah Zablud Azen is a long-time student of traditional indigenous lifeways, non-revisionist history, economics, and land tenure issues – passports to understanding humanity’s present predicament and enabling us to identify practical solutions for survival and restored balance in a new era. Rebekah can be reached at 505.424.9475 or rebekah@cybermesa.com

Print PDF

The factor of land in home affordability has been discussed in preceding articles with emphasis upon the Community Land Trust as the most efficacious means of securing permanently affordable homeownership for this and future generations. We now turn to housing and the factors that make it affordable.

There are three fundamental and integrative concepts involved. The first is the house itself or the building, the second is labor, and the third is intelligent design for resources and energy, including infrastructure. When these three factors are properly analyzed and stitched together, a house will not only be uncommonly affordable, but will prove to be the most environmentally harmonious among all green building approaches, and the most self-sufficient, free of dependency-producing, external inputs.

“Affordable homeownership” should fulfill some very fundamental conditions, and if it does not, then perhaps it is not worthy of the designation. Common sense, intelligence, and information – not high tech, compelling advertising, or high investment, are what are required to ensure true affordability.

Small is Still Beautiful

With as much surety as death and taxes, home size has been increasing in an unrelenting march towards obesity. Prior to the bloated era of SUV and Hummer homes reaching a median of more that 2,500 square feet in 2008, homes were much smaller historically. The first North American homes were very small, one-room, one-story structures averaging less than 450 sq. feet. Bedrooms were an invention of the late 18th century and only the well-to-do could afford such luxuries. Early 20th century bungalows were between 600-800 sq. feet. By 1950, the average home size in the US was 983 sq. feet. In just over five decades between 1950 and 2008, the median square footage of a typical home jumped 150%.

Despite the fact that less room was needed as society modernized and domestic production was removed to the factory for food, clothing, energy and other necessities, homes continued to grow ever larger. Paralleling these changes in domestic production, households were growing ever smaller as families had fewer children. But home size did not decrease. Homeownership, like nothing else, symbolizes success in America, and there are now excess rooms available for every possible want: home offices, computer rooms, media/entertainment centers, bars, saunas, laundry, hobby, guest, and exercise rooms.

Concurrently, land and lot sizes have diminished as land prices have gone up. The two-story home was an invention which increased house size while decreasing the need for land. Overall, house size continues to increase while land size contracts, like some comic strip character with an oversized chest on spindly legs.

Parting ways with the bigger-is-better McMansion trend is the arrival of the Small House Movement, a refreshing new development. Their professed mission is to promote simpler, more sustainable living with less use of resources, and less impact on the planet. They promote awareness of the “ecological, economic, and psychological toll that excessive housing takes on our lives,” and support the credo, “live simply so that others may simply live.” They promote housing that is downsized, beginning as small as 140 sq. feet, but there is no “right number,” just a smaller square footage.

It is disconcerting that what is so obvious about affordable housing should need to be pointed out; that size matters and that we should be attending to this most basic tenet. How much room does one really need? If 600-800 sq. feet was sufficient in the early 20th century, why not today? Doesn’t size, more than most anything else, contribute to affordability, not only in terms of materials and labor, but also energy use? Why do we overlook this most basic condition for affordable housing? We need to become smaller and minimize, not just with affordable housing but with all housing as a first principle of green building.

Build only to the extent that is necessary. It saves on materials, labor, and energy. There are many ingenious ways to conserve space and still make a home livable and comfortable. Just recently it was reported that in Los Angeles, apartments of 350 sq. feet are a growing trend due to the ever-increasing escalation of land values. Ordinary, middle-class Americans are having to adapt to less space and use it more constructively, which ironically enough, due to the limits of land privatization, is producing at least one beneficial result.

Building on the idea of a smaller house is the practice of incremental building, as commonly seen in “third world” countries. The central part of the house is built to support all living functions, and as money becomes available, rooms or extensions are added. In this way, building can proceed as money is earned, without having to wait 30 years to save enough, or take out a monstrous loan that keeps the borrower indebted for life.

Affordable building materials are natural, local in origin, with low embodied energy and low transport costs. Straw bale, adobe bricks and mud are perfect examples of inexpensive resources that we have locally in abundance or can produce easily. The cost of adobes for a 500 sq. foot home is so minimal it’s shocking. Just 1620 adobes or less would be needed. At .97 for each, that amounts to just $1,571. If I made my adobes, it would cost $22 for the dirt to make 75 bricks, for a total cost of about $475; less than a week of work on many a salary. Straw bale is just as inexpensive. These figures put affordable within reach of anyone.

Used building materials such as fixtures, tile, wood, sinks and faucets can be purchased through places like the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store at a fraction of the original price.

High tech is endlessly and shamelessly promoted because it serves green industries, but the way to go for affordability is low tech, from passive solar design for heating and cooling, to rainwater catchment for indoor (and outdoor) water use, solar batch water heating, compost toilets, window ventilation, natural shading, natural solar lighting, a small wood stove for backup heat, and more. These systems not only cost less to implement but are also much easier and cost-effective to maintain.

A Liberated Context for “Organized Labor”

Next to land, labor is another major expense. Very simply, the bigger the home, the more labor is required, which raises the price of the home. Labor costs can be substantially reduced by staying small.

The joy of building one’s own home is certainly a natural human endeavor but like so many things in modern life, has been “abducted” by professionals. We’ve given over control of so much: our health to the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance industries, our food supply to industrial agriculture, our education to pedagogic bureaucrats, our housing to developers, and even our dying to the merchants of death. But building a home is not rocket science. It’s been done for millennia with materials of the earth: hides, brick, sticks, stones, mud and mortar. Building codes can be intimidating but they needn’t stop us from assuming control. Professional guidance can be employed where needed.

The great thing about Community Land Trusts is that they can supply a ready labor force, as they have at Tierra Madre for example, in Sunland Park, NM. The homes, selling on average for $23,000, are affordable not only because the land is held in trust but because the labor comes from the people and families of the CLT. Members’ contributions of labor help one another as a community. The old barn raising idea is ancient but can still serve us well today. Traditional, cooperative, home building efforts break down where land has been commoditized and privatized, but can be resurrected when land is returned to communities.

Mirroring and emulating the natural world, our ancestors engaged in mutual aid to obtain all they needed, including shelter. We, on the other hand, live in an economic order based on competition and have forgotten that the web of life is sustained because of mutual aid. “Survival of the fittest,” is not the first dictum of life, but rather “mutual aid,” as discovered by Alexander Kropotkin, the 19th century scientist and social philosopher. The natural world is organized toward interdependence in a billion-zillion ways from the Earth’s relation to the Sun, Moon and stars, to the largest organisms and the smallest atom. Darwin’s discoveries have been blown entirely out of proportion to serve powerful interests. They are only valid when placed within the larger context of mutual aid. We would do well to return to the natural order, assisting others and discovering the benefits that accrue, not only to the whole but to oneself as well.

An Earthship State of Mind

Intelligent design for resource and energy use is really simple. Work with nature. Harmonize with the natural elements. Use what we are given from the sun, slope, shade, earth and wind to conserve resources and use energy wisely, so that outside inputs are either minimized or non-existent. This is the bedrock for quintessential affordability.

Mainstream society uses the resources of this planet like we are on an extended luxury cruise ship and have the right to endless amenities brought from the other side of the globe with no thought as to the limits of the natural world. This entitlement mentality pervades homeowners of traditionally built homes and green homes. “Green” homes can easily compete with the most inflated, excessive, indulgent, exorbitant, and extravagant buildings on the planet. Substituting green technology for traditional technology is not a panacea. Allowing market forces to dictate the agenda leads to our collective detriment. What really needs changing is our fundamental relationship to the natural world, a restored sense of natural limitation and balance, reflected in the homes we inhabit. What we need is a new environmental ethos for green building.

Instead of looking outside of what we are given for what we don’t have, a sure sign of the entitlement mentality, we need to refocus and see all that we do have, and use those resources appropriately.

Right here in NM, we have everything needed to radically revise this whole green building equation and we have a model from which to work. It’s called the Earthship. Michael Reynolds, an architectural visionary from Taos, NM, developed the Earthship model over 40 years ago. He wasn’t looking to build affordable housing. He was looking for a way for people to survive a planetary crisis due to human exploitation of the earth’s resources; when peak oil, peak water and peak resources of every sort have run their course. What he discovered was a new design for human habitation, housing that aligns with limitless natural phenomena. The Earthship concept is a dwelling that rides the earth’s “wind” and “waves.” As Reynolds says, this is about “riding the earth,” not harnessing, capturing or exploiting. He says that our space module is the earth, and we are born out of its systems and rhythms. The earth can sustain us if we but learn how the systems work and properly align ourselves.

Reynolds devised an architecture that aligns with the earth rather than the earth having to align with us; a formula for sanity and a return to environmental harmony. But there is more. The earth alignment concept manifests as a self-contained, self-sufficient home that provides for all of its own needs without any outside life support systems for heating, cooling, water, light, power and sewage treatment.

What could be more affordable than a home that doesn’t require our supporting it, like we support the government, the military, the corporations, the bankers, the landowners, the car, the education we need to get a decent paying job, paying monthly on a gas bill, an electric bill and a water bill? An Earthship is a home that produces everything it needs, not this year or next year, but every year over its entire earthly life. This isn’t a modest reduction in crippling energy expenses. This is freedom!

Building science has evolved systems that go beyond and improve upon what Reynolds originally designed, but the primary components still apply. What we need to do is take the primary components and upgrade them where it is warranted. For example, space heating and cooling in the Earthship are achieved with passive solar design using correct siting, accurate orientation to the sun, thermal mass, ventilation, and shading. Minimal backup heat is required even in very cold temperatures. Today it would make more sense to combine thermal mass in the floors with superior insulation provided by straw bale in the exterior walls to reduce fluctuations in temperature and hold heat or cool air in more effectively. We could also insulate under the floors and in the roof, rather than using dirt, which is not a good insulator. Other measures would include vertical rather than slanted glass to mitigate excessive summer heating, and better use of overhangs, ventilation and shading. The massive amounts of dirt that are piled over an Earthship are designed to keep the temperature from going below the constant earth temperature of 58 degrees about eight feet underground. A sound idea, but here again, straw bale is a superior insulator, requires less labor, and there’s no risk of radon exposure. Backup heat requirements would remain very minimal to nonexistent. A small woodstove or a fireplace in a well designed, passive solar, thermal mass home would be all that is needed on occasion.

Earthships collect all their water for indoor use from rain/snowmelt catchment, and they do not have underground wells. If one is conservative with water, the rain that falls from the sky is plenty enough, even in high desert, arid country. Throughout most of NM, about 10-20 inches of rain/snow fall annually, with the higher elevations typically receiving more. Climate maps show exact figures. An average American uses about 100 gallons a day or an astounding 36,000 gallons a year. One should be able to get by on 20 gallons a day or less by remaining vigilant about water use; by bathing a few times a week instead of daily, using composting toilets which are water-free, eliminating dish washing machines, running clothes washers weekly or bi-weekly, and hanging clothes out to dry. A 600 sq. foot roof on a small house located in Mora County where precipitation is around 20 inches per year can catch 7,476 gallons per year, enough for 20 gallons a day. The formula for determining how much water can be caught is the following: square footage of roof x annual average inches of rainfall x .623.

The amount of water to be obtained can be extended by utilizing the rooftops of sheds or barns for catchment. Water can also be extended by reusing it. Earthships recycle water four times. It is first used for bathing or washing and then fed to indoor plants. It is used a third time to flush ultra-low-flush toilets, and a fourth time to water outdoor foliage. The beauty of water catchment is that it forces us to become aware of water as a precious resource and to live within our means. It also safeguards water in the aquifers and allows them to replenish. As for affordability, the costly expense of drilling a well is eliminated.

Hot water can be readily obtained from simple solar batch heaters that capture the sun’s heat. These units contain both the heating element and the tank in one, and use gravity to operate. They are low-tech systems that are easy to operate and maintain, and can be custom built without great difficulty. One can utilize these systems effectively by conserving hot water and by remaining flexible as to when hot water is available due to the sun’s appearance, but in NM that is normally not an issue.

As for power and electric; again, as in space heating, lighting and hot water heating, the most sensible option is the sun, an abundant and underutilized free source of energy here in NM. Electrical needs are really minimal for anyone who has simplified one’s life and living arrangements. The only appliance that needs constant electricity is a refrigerator. Electrical lights can be minimized with natural lighting obtained from proper passive solar house design. The stove and perhaps a clothes washer are the only other appliances that require electricity. All the appliances and lighting should be energy efficient. The only other electrical need is for water pumps to push water and perhaps a few other sundry technical devices. In all, electrical needs are reduced substantially because all of the systems discussed avoid the use of electricity (space heating/cooling, lighting, hot water), and combined with judicious use, the need for photovoltaics are minimized.

As with systems that do not depend on electricity, a similar savings in water can be obtained though the use of composting toilets. There is no polluting black water to contend with that requires treatment. Composting toilets can be purchased or built from local materials for near nothing. The caveat with composting toilets is that they need to be utilized properly to avoid the spread of bacterial contamination. The solar composting toilet engineered by Reynolds eliminates this possible hazard. The toilet is in effect a solar oven. It heats human waste to such a high temperature that there is nothing left but a handful of harmless ash.

The Sustainable Development Testing Site Act

Earthships, or some modification on the theme, are self-contained and self-sufficient. They do not require any inputs from an infrastructure or grid for water, gas, electric or sewage. Infrastructure costs are not only substantial in fiscal terms, adding to the unaffordability of homes, but require massive amounts of energy to construct, maintain and deliver resources, and inflict huge energy losses. As an example, coal-fired power plants provide about 65% of our electrical energy. About 2/3 of that energy is lost at the power plant, so the system is only 33% efficient (this is what accounts for a large proportion of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere). Of that 33%, most of the energy is lost a second time in delivery to the homeowner so that only about 10% -14% reaches the home.

It’s a crying shame that these archaic, costly, polluting, resource depleting, energy inefficient, unnecessarily burdensome infrastructure systems are required by state and local law in every jurisdiction in the US.

But New Mexico stands alone in birthing an alternative. The Sustainable Development Testing Site Act (SDTSA), enacted by the NM Legislature on July 1, 2007, is watershed legislation. This amazing, one-of-a-kind law, brought to fruition through the unceasing efforts of Michael Reynolds and Rep. Bobby Gonzales (D-Taos), defines a sustainable development as “a live-in environment composed of structures and systems that inherently produce utilities and life-support systems free of existing conventional grids and disposal systems.” Under the Act, sustainable development includes the provision of onsite energy via renewable resources, provision of water while minimizing withdrawal from ground and surface water, provision of sewage treatment with zero discharge, reuse of materials discarded by modern society, and the development of organic foods and fuel.

The intention of the Act is clearly stated as “approval of areas for non-industrial research and testing designed to reduce the consumption of and dependence on natural resources by residential development.”

It allows any parcel of land of two acres or less, outside of municipal boundaries, to be designated as a sustainable development site, obtainable with a permit from a county planning commission. The testing site permit allows for, a) sustainable development research that can be conducted within the site, and b) county codes, ordinances, rules or permits that are not applicable to the permittee and the research. A person desiring a testing site permit submits an application to the planning commission where the proposed development testing site is located. A public hearing follows and the planning commission hears comments from all interested persons. Following the hearing, the planning commission makes a decision on whether or not to issue a permit.

A two-acre parcel of land for residential development sounds small for a sustainable community but actually quite a number of homes can be situated within that amount of acreage. Historically, villagers throughout the world lived in close proximity for reasons of safety, assistance, social well-being, community cohesion, and intelligent use of resources. Here in NM, Pueblo people traditionally lived in apartment-like dwellings. At Earthship Village Ecologies (EVE), one of the Earthship sites in Taos County, they are in the process of building residential homes for 25 people on a 2-acre SDTSA parcel. A Community Land Trust could have any number of acres and devote a 2-acre parcel specifically for residential use, while the rest of the land is used for farmland, wilderness preservation, open space, etc. With a larger parcel of CLT land, perhaps it is possible to use another 2-acre parcel in some other location for more residential and community development. The law is not clear as to how many two-acre parcels could be designated a SDTSA site within a larger parcel of land and where these sites might be located in proximity to one another. As with any new development of great significance, it will take the efforts of many people utilizing the new law to test and expand the boundaries. But surely, in time, as resource and energy constraints continue to mount, the two-acre limitation will be but a memory and the skeletal remains of infrastructure grids a shocking testament to a bygone era.

In summary, truly affordable homeownership can be obtained by putting the pieces together. The formula is simple: small, Earthship-type, self-sufficient homes located on SDTSA sites within a Community Land Trust. The end result is exceedingly splendid: the resurrection of affordability, self-sufficiency, independence, community, sovereignty and environmental sustainability.

* If anyone has land to donate for an emerging rural, self-sufficient, sustainable CLT, please contact Rebekah (contact info below).

To be continued next month. Part 6, the finale, will be a summary of the Kidnapped series, touching on some of the profound and far-reaching implications for our future. This article is also available online at The Santa Fe New Mexican website http://www.santafegreenline.com/

Rebekah Zablud Azen is a long-time student of traditional indigenous lifeways, non-revisionist history, economics, and land tenure issues – passports to understanding humanity’s present predicament and enabling us to identify practical solutions for survival and restored balance in a new era. Rebekah can be reached at 505.424.9475 or rebekah@cybermesa.com

Print PDF

We are arriving at a juncture in history where old land-tenure arrangements are no longer working and must be replaced by new arrangements. Though there is probably nothing more sacred in the Western psyche than private property, it is truly a Pandora’s box of unforeseen consequences. This reality has not yet dawned upon the general consciousness but the warning signs are abundantly clear, and the cost of housing is just one flashing red light. In 1955, Peter van Dresser bought a home on Canyon Rd. for $850. Today, my monthly rent exceeds that amount. If nothing else, Americans are beginning to realize that the “American Dream” of owning a home is a dream; it is simply out of reach or requires such an extraordinary sacrifice that it is not worth pursuing.

Ironically, what began as an alternative land tenure model for low-income, poverty-stricken, disenfranchised communities has become the model for what everyone needs access to today, affordable homeownership. The Community Land Trust (CLT) movement has grown exponentially in the last forty years and there are now over 241 CLT’s across the US according to the National Community Land Trust Network. Unquestionably, the primary objective of the modern CLT movement is to provide affordable homeownership and its ability to deliver on that promise is most impressive. As small as this movement is, it has not gone unnoticed. Local government community planning agencies and affordable housing offices around the country are paying considerable attention to assisting emerging CLT’s because they have discovered that public subsidies for permanently affordable homeownership are best utilized and retained with the CLT model.

In NM, we have three CLT’s. Sawmill Community Land Trust in Albuquerque, Tierra Madre Community Land Trust in Sunland Park, NM, and the Jacona Farmland Trust near Pojoaque, NM.

The Sawmill Community Land Trust, founded in 1997, is most consistent with the classic CLT model because the land is wholly owned by the nonprofit, the residents have direct democratic control, and they have instituted a land use plan. Sawmill has built over 56 affordable homes and is planning a commercial site, community center, neighborhood park, and community garden. Sawmill is considered one of the most successful CLT’s in the country.

Tierra Madre Community Land Trust was founded by the Sisters of Charity in 1998 to serve low-income, Spanish-speaking, Mexican Americans in Sunland Park near the border of Mexico. The community has nearly 50 units of passive-solar, straw-bale housing, built largely by the co-operative effort of member families. Homes are sold for an average of $23,400. The CLT holds a 99-year long-term lease with the State of NM, and homeowners in turn lease land from the CLT for about $100 per year. Because of this unusual arrangement, Tierra Madre is not a true CLT because they don’t presently own the land, but perhaps that will come.

Jacona Farmland Trust was founded by Helenty Homans, a Czech native who immigrated here at age twelve to escape WWII Europe. In 2004 she donated her 3.8 acres with agricultural land and three homes to the Santa Fe Community Housing Trust to ensure affordable housing to future generations. Jacona is not a true CLT either because it is managed by the Housing Trust, but is a big step in the right direction. Said Homans, “My motive – again, it’s a tiny little thing I’m doing – is combining the intent to have affordable housing, open space, and to preserve agricultural uses, because New Mexico has been a real second home for me, after my homeland.” Jacona Farm is a model for future development in rural NM.

The Town of Cochiti Lake is not a CLT or any variation thereof, but it is worth mentioning because 400+ people live on long-term leased land owned by the Pueblo of Cochiti, thus homes are considerably less expensive than elsewhere.

Community Land Trusts are often confused with other arrangements so it’s important to clarify what they are not. Real Estate Trusts are private trusts for private purposes, organized for specified beneficiaries and/or financial gain. Land Conservancy Trusts preserve land and protect it from development. The preservation of land is their sole aim and they are not intended for human uses. Agricultural Trusts are similarly organized, to preserve farmland from the encroachment of development, but they also aim to keep farmland usable for agricultural activity. Communes and intentional communities are typically organized as private trusts created by and for people with a shared philosophic outlook. Limited equity cooperative members own shares of a co-op’s assets. A CLT is not any of these but will typically collaborate with conservancy and agricultural trusts, and lease land to co-ops.

A CLT is designed for human uses, for improvements to the land for mutual benefit. A CLT is not designed for land preservation but for land use (though land preservation can be an incorporated as an objective). The land must be put to use to benefit individuals and communities.

Besides the main benefit of affordable housing, there are also many incidental benefits that naturally arise from this new land tenure arrangement. CLT’s are naturally insulated from the devastating effects of private property, free of land concentration, land speculation, and absentee landlordism. CLT land cannot be sold and land cannot be used for any purpose other than what the community deems an appropriate, sustainable use. Because of these factors, CLT’s naturally restore individual and community interests and balance those interests so that individuals and communities get their needs met both today and tomorrow.

Both individuals and communities have valid and legitimate interests in land tenure and land use. Individuals want and need affordable homes that cannot be pulled out from under them for long-term security and generational continuity. True communities are built from this basis with all members of the community being housed equitably, affordably, and securely.

The community wants and needs to maintain continuous access to its land for all its members for housing, a sustainable local economy, and social well-being. Communities also want and need to retain whatever value has been created collectively such as communal resources and amenities, and a stable and healthy community character. And like individuals, communities want and need to pass on a sound inheritance and legacy to future generations.

The equation noted above should be commonplace; the primacy of individual and community interests with a balance between the two, but surprisingly, it does not presently exist. Present day private property arrangements stealthily but assuredly erode and finally topple individual as well as community interests.

To put this in perspective, NM provides a fine case study. The federal government owns 41.8% of land in NM and the State of NM owns 12% of the land (private/corporate interests control much federal and state land for mining, gas, oil, ranching, and forestry). Native American tribes own a little less than 10% of land in NM. Adding up these figures, it appears that federal, state, and Indian lands account for about 64% of land in NM, so private land must amount for about 36% of the state. Ted Turner, the renowned “green” land speculator/grabber, alone owns 4% of the land in NM, about 2 million acres, leaving 32% or less of privately held land in NM. Of that 32%, 90% of that land is held by just 5% of the populace/corporations (1983 NM survey). That leaves just 4% of all the land in NM for 95% of the population of NM (or in other terms, Ted Turner owns as much land as 95% of the population of NM). In sum, a very small minority of private/corporate interests are controlling 86% of the land in NM (10% of land is held for Indian reservations), so just 4% of land in NM is available for virtually the entire population of NM.

It is absurd, given our present context, to talk about individual and community rights and interests. They have been shredded. The reality is that a minority of private/corporate interests control and dominate individual interests as well as community interests. The consequences of this arrangement can be noted at every level of society, from the local to the national and international levels. We surely wouldn’t be in the position we’re presently in with corporate monopolies and international financial institutions dominating our lives if it weren’t for this takeover. Oil Company BP could not be polluting the gulf waters and threatening our entire oceanic life, and the life of our planet, if it were not for private interests dominating and usurping individual and community interests. Private property arrangements exacerbate gross imbalances of power and create untenable conditions for people and the planet.

The growing crisis of affordable housing here in Santa Fe is a perfect example of a community having lost control of its land base and its fundamental rights, as individuals and families, the foundation of communities, are held hostage to this situation, left landless and homeless, deep in debt and struggling daily to make ends meet. What security, what rights, what sovereignty, what sustainability, what community, what local control, what local economy, and what well-being do individuals and communities have left? Less and less as time goes on. Democracy is usurped at the economic level long before it ever reaches the political level.

A sense of place and a sense of security are so vital to individuals and communities, which are constructed of individuals forming larger social organisms that are lost and adrift without this cohesion. The two are inextricably bound. It’s uncanny that we place such little value on these fundamental conditions for human and societal well-being. We seem largely anesthetized to the fact that these things even matter, and substitute a flimsy proposition that a good job, a family, and “success in life” (i.e. economic prosperity), should suffice. But our condition, underneath it all, and in spite of the bravado, is incredibly unstable, insecure, and anxiety-ridden.

The insecurity that people un-naturally endure is real and a consequence of economic conditions generated by inequitable land tenure arrangements. And the angst is real as well and generates real social consequences. The threat of unemployment due to job cuts, illness, and economic conditions that we have no control over, is like an ever-present alarm in the back of our head. There is no home to turn to for most of us that is truly safe, stable, and secure, where we are assured that our needs will be met for as long as we need refuge. Even the birds have refuge and are given sanctuary. Why is it that the concept of refuge is an anachronism in today’s society?

Notwithstanding an earthquake or political coup, a Community Land Trust provides a blueprint for restoring individual and community security. First of all, a CLT home can be had so much less expensively than a typical home that it can be paid off much more quickly, leaving behind years of labor and the vicissitudes of fortune or fate. The land can be acquired by donation, leaving its members free of creditors immediately; or if purchased with all hands contributing, the land can be paid off quickly. That a community holds the land in perpetuity, and not privately for short-term profit provides another layer of protection. And the community itself, the people of the CLT, are invested in the land and place collectively, for long term benefit. One needn’t struggle alone, and help, collective labor, camaraderie and other benefits can be procured. A CLT is here to stay; that is its mission. The people and the land are re-bound and re-united.

Even more security can be infused into a CLT by creating self-sufficiency so that the homes are not dependent on outside life support systems and neither are its inhabitants. CLT members can build their own local economy to the best of their ability. The Pueblo communities and the villages of northern New Mexico were completely self-sufficient and independent for centuries, producing their own foodstuffs, shelter, and all other necessities for comfortable living. A farm, pasturage, hunting, fishing, orchards and a commons served a small community well.

Right here at home we have an extraordinary model for what this can look like. The Pueblo of Tesuque is presently engaged in re-building self-sufficiency through their farm project, the Tesuque Agricultural Initiative. They grow traditional Native foods of corn, beans and squash, as well as vegetables and fruit. They also have goats for milk and cheese, chickens for meat and eggs, and bees for honey. Their aim is to feed the entire Pueblo of 600 people. The Pueblo of Tesuque, just like all the other pueblos, never privatized land so they are in the envious position of having land and being able to designate it for local needs such as food production.

Re-establishing the self-sufficient rural village is not so far-fetched and we’re certainly not the first generation to be thinking about local self-sufficiency and local economies. In 1974, Peter van Dresser, the decentralist, solar pioneer, and community visionary, wrote a 17-part series in the New Mexican describing in detail how to resurrect New Mexico village life.

In contrast to the Pueblos, the city or county of Santa Fe would have to purchase land they don’t have, which costs a fortune today, to even think about providing food production for the residents here. Santa Fe Canyon Ranch, recently acquired by Santa Fe County for $7 million, is located in the La Cienega Valley. There are 470 acres of which a substantial proportion is prime agricultural land. Will this land be used for agriculture and affordable housing in equitable CLT arrangements to serve our local community or will it be privatized as is the usual course of events and the entire public investment lost almost immediately?

The fact of the matter is that we no longer have control over our food production just like we no longer have control over housing that is affordable. What is known as the “farmland crisis,” the inaccessibility of land for small farmers, is as severe or even more severe than the affordable housing crisis. Should the economy be disrupted or fail, even temporarily, we will see a major tragedy unfold. It is estimated that just 3% of our food is grown locally, and it’s very probable that much of that food is grown on land that is not owned by the farmer. His tenancy is as unstable as our own. And the farmers that do own land? What guarantee is there that they won’t be forced to sell their land, leaving for jobs in the city when they can no longer remain financially solvent, a problem that has been plaguing farmers for well over a century.

The “land problem” is multi-dimensional and circuitous; our land is held hostage, unavailable for housing or food production, the two major necessities of life.

The Community Land Trust can reverse not only the problem of affordable housing but can return land to the people for local food production. The importance of this dual function, this potential of a CLT, cannot be overstated. There are very few community land trusts today that recognize the patterns of the overall land tenure picture, incorporating both of these elements into their land use plan, returning affordable housing and local food production back to the people, but it will and must come.

Individual and community rights and interests can be restored but the key is that people regain control and sovereignty over their lives. The CLT model in whatever form it takes makes this possible, whether it be affordable housing or an effort at complete self-sufficiency. Whatever a CLT community wants and needs is possible. Local control over housing and land-use decisions are inherent, indivisible, and indefinite. The organization is democratically organized with open membership, inclusive governance, and direct accountability to the community it serves. Security, safety, a sense of place, and a refuge are just some of the many beneficial byproducts. This is local control at its finest.

The Community Land Trust is unique and its benefits immeasurable. Anyone can start or participate in forming a CLT and there are no legal impediments to its formation. It does not require an Act of Congress, a “transfer tax” or any redistribution of wealth, does not require a bloody uprising, a Che Guevara leader, or turn our economy into socialism or communism. It restores the integrity of individuals and communities, and puts control back into the hands of people. It is ancient. It is modern. It is ethical. It is time.

The Community Land Trust model will continue to evolve and incorporate more and more of the sustainability movement, beginning with better methods for building truly affordable, green homes; energy conservation and use of renewables; farmland and wildlands preservation; and local economic self-sufficiency. The CLT movement is growing and with it comes more and more land to be reclaimed by the people, for the common good. The Community Land Trust model can take us in the direction we must turn as we confront the impasse before us; enlivening community, reclaiming democracy, respecting the Earth, sharing our inheritance, re-learning independence, self-sufficiency, and sovereignty, and re-connecting with life.

* If anyone has land to donate for an emerging rural, self-sufficient, sustainable CLT, please contact Rebekah (contact info below).

To be continued next month, Part 5 will investigate non-polluting and non-extracting, affordable green building for self-sufficiency. This article is also available online at The Santa Fe New Mexican website http://www.santafegreenline.com/

Rebekah Zablud Azen is a long-time student of traditional indigenous lifeways, non-revisionist history, economics, and land tenure issues – passports to understanding humanity’s present predicament and enabling us to identify practical solutions for survival and restored balance in a new era. Rebekah can be reached at 505.424.9475 or rebekah@cybermesa.com.

Print PDF

The Indispensable Community Land Trust

“Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come in yours and my discharge,” the celebrated words of William Shakespeare summarize all too precisely our present predicament. We are circumstantial inheritors of land tenure patterns spanning centuries that typify gross disparities in land distribution and the accompanying maldistribution of social and economic benefits, along with a limitless expansion of destructive “externalities” (a term used by economists to describe the largely unaccounted-for fallout of economic progress) such as ecological collapse, resource depletion, and massive social dysfunction. That the majority of people lack access to affordable housing is just one example of lost benefits. Thus, the return of those benefits accruing back to the people can only be accomplished through land reform.

The Community Land Trust (CLT) is a type of land reform that doesn’t simply redistribute land but radically alters underlying land tenure arrangements. It provides enduring relief from the unrelenting rise in land values and reverses destructive land tenure patterns that have led to our predicament. It is a form of common land ownership and common stewardship for the common good, as opposed to private land ownership for personal gain, and is based on very old land use patterns that existed for millennia. The CLT model is not simply a philosophical idea for the eventual attainment of affordable housing in decades to come but provides a proven, practical means by which affordable housing is attainable now.

The way this is accomplished, quite simply, is by eliminating the cost of land from the cost of housing. There are only two major costs to housing, a) land, and b) the house itself (including infrastructure, if there is any, to be explained in Part 5). Land is typically a major expense, if not the major expense in housing and that is why “affordable housing” is typically concentrated in areas where land prices are lowest, such as the south side of Santa Fe, while the amount of land provided to homeowners shrinks to a pinhead. The ever decreasing availability of “affordable” land, and congestion, trying to fit more and more on less land, are a growing problem for affordable housing initiatives. Houdini-like attempts to escape these realities are chimerical.

A CLT eliminates the cost of the land to the homeowner because the land is held and owned in common by the community, in perpetuity. The homeowner does not purchase the land on which the home sits. No one person owns, controls, or can sell any part of it. The land in a CLT is held in trust by a democratically-governed, not-for-profit organization (federal tax-exempt status not necessarily recommended) with membership open to any resident in the region. The trust removes land permanently from the speculative market and facilitates multiple uses of the land through the drafting of a sustainable land-use plan with affordable housing being a primary component. Other uses for the land can include: farmland preservation; appropriate small-scale industry, CSA’s, co-ops, and guilds; community gardens; community facilities such as arts & crafts workshops, libraries, dining halls, and schools; outdoor recreation areas for parks, playgrounds, and walking trails; and land conservation. The CLT leases land for affordable housing (or other agreed upon purposes) to individuals or groups (e.g. co-op), with an inheritable and renewable long term lease, typically for 99 years. The lessee pays a nominal, yearly, ground lease fee for use of the land.

The reason that homes remain affordable for future generations is twofold, a) homeowners are simply leasing land from the CLT at a trifling expense as opposed to purchasing it, and b) the homeowner owns the improvements to the land, namely the home only, not the land itself. Homeowners build equity in the home, but do not build equity from the land. The home can be sold at a profit but there are re-sale restrictions that the CLT imposes to ensure that future homebuyers can afford the home.

Individual home equity profit is balanced by community needs and each CLT decides what is fair and equitable in their re-sale formula. Homeownership in a CLT provides an opportunity to not only obtain an affordable home but provides an opportunity to build equity, unlike renting which does neither but assure the impoverishment of individuals and communities.

The land for a CLT is obtained in any number of ways: through a private gift of land; through a public gift of land (city, county or state); through a private monetary donation or a public donation (city, county or state grant); or through direct purchase. If the land is donated or the money is supplied through a donation or grant, there is nothing to pay off or pay back. If the land is purchased, the original purchasers can choose to recapture their investment through the ground leases over time. Once the land is free and clear of any financial encumbrances, the cost of housing to all future generations is reduced dramatically, whatever type of housing there is, because a CLT member only pays for the home and not the land.

Hopefully, as people become accustomed to the myriad social, economic, and ecological benefits of community land trusts, people will consider it natural, sustainable, and sane to gift land to CLT’s for the long-term, well-being of their communities.

Land for a Community Land Trust need not be rural and there are many examples of successful urban CLT’s around the country, with or without homes already standing. Urban CLT’s, like rural CLT’s, were originally designed to provide affordable housing to disenfranchised, low-income communities plagued by absentee landlords, concentration of ownership, land speculation, displacement, and gentrification. In the city, gentrification leaves people homeless, but in rural areas, the influx of recreation enthusiasts and the wealthy seeking vacation or second homes has the same effect.

One of the most successful urban CLT’s is located in Albuquerque, NM. The Sawmill Community Land Trust is located in a traditional neighborhood near the downtown business district and historic old town. This low-income neighborhood was threatened with displacement due to rising land values and gentrification so they banded together to save their homes and way of life. Since 1997, Sawmill has reclaimed 27 acres from the city of Albuquerque. They now have 23 affordable homes, a park, plaza, community center, offices, retail space, manufacturing, senior apartments, and live/work spaces for home businesses.

A Community Land Trust is exceptionally versatile and adaptable and there is no one way to do things. Besides being urban or rural, a CLT can be very small or very large. The Jacona Farmland Trust in Jacona, NM is just 3.8 acres. It has five homes and a two-acre farm. One of the largest CLT’s is in Vermont, the Champlain Housing Trust, with over 2,000 households stretched across three counties. Rhode Island, Delaware, and Montana boast emerging statewide CLT’s. There is however great merit in “small is beautiful,” as coined and discussed in E.F. Schumacher’s classic book on community economics, and so a CLT should consider the implications of size on participatory democracy, social well-being, ecological impact, and other quality-of-life factors. A convincing argument can be made for a natural limit to the size of communities as demonstrated in traditional villages and among indigenous peoples.

Another example of the natural elasticity of a CLT is that it can be located on contiguous or non-contiguous land. It needn’t be altogether in one place. Many CLT’s are in the business of acquiring more land for affordable housing, either urban or rural, and often the land acquisitions are non-contiguous. In a city, with land ownership so checkerboard, this approach can prove very practical in creating affordable homeownership opportunities, eliminating affordable housing concentration in any specific area. Furthermore, CLT’s can form alliances and confederations for greater economic and social benefits.

Origins

The roots of the community land trust are very ancient. The underlying principle, which has been accepted by most people throughout time, is that land and natural resources are by nature bequeathed to all of us communally as our inheritance, one generation to the next, and it is our obligation to use these resources equitably and wisely. The land and resources are not ours to own. The land owns us (we come from, are nourished by, and return to earth) and we are merely stewards for the moment. In the timeline of human habitation on Earth, the idea of private land ownership is very recent. Our indigenous ancestors could never for a moment dream of owning land, something given by the spirit world that no human created. It was as inconceivable as owning air, rivers, or mountains. The only conceivable corollary to contemporary notions of private property were personal items, like clothes or tools, which were made from the land by the people who used them and were often buried with them.

The social philosopher Ralph Borsodi is the first individual to be associated with the CLT movement. He was concerned about the problems of urban society as early as the 1920’s and assisted in the development of several communities based on Georgist principles. Interestingly enough, he was corresponding with Peter Van Dresser, who in 1949 was building solar and wind-powered homes in northern NM for similarly decentralized, self-sufficient communities. Borsodi noted that governments were reluctant to institute a land-vale-tax as proposed by Henry George, so he discovered a way to translate George’s ideas into the field of applied economics. He resurrected the ancient idea of land stewardship and trusteeship in Seventeen Problems of Man and Society, published in 1968; that land does not come into existence as a result of human labor and thus cannot be morally owned but can only be held in trust. And that with land being a limited commodity with increasing demands put upon it, it must be regulated for the long-range welfare of all people.

Consequently, the CLT idea is as much about common ownership as about ownership for the common good, a point that can be easily missed, and in the final analysis is the more significant piece of the equation. This is the ancient and indigenous way of understanding our correct relationship to land, natural resources, and one another. “All our relations” is a clear and simple expression of that understanding. A corporation (an elite form of common ownership) can own land as well but its aims and interests are only for profit and gain, because it is situated within the old land tenure structure that allows and perpetuates parasitism. Within the CLT structure, land cannot be bought and sold, and that imposes in some real, material, economic sense, a new relationship to land and a new relationship to one another. That, in itself, is a rather significant byproduct for human evolution and has important implications to be discussed in the summary.

The official founding of the CLT movement began in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, and is largely attributed to Robert Swann who took his inspiration from Borsodi, but was influenced as well by the events of WWII, Gandhi, Henry George and other great minds. There were many other brilliant social thinkers/collaborators as well that joined in the momentum, such as Chuck Matthei and Charles Geisler. Mildred Loomis and Susan Witt (executive director of the EF Schumacher Society since 1980), the respective partners of Borsodi and Swan, deserve belated recognition. The International Independence Institute, which later morphed into the Institute for Community Economics, was an unparalleled think tank for the development of the CLT idea. The groundbreaking publication on CLT’s, authored by Swann and others, came out in 1972 and was titled, The Community Land Trust, A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America.

Borsodi worked with Vinoba Bhave, a disciple of Gandhi in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Vinoba and others walked from village to village requesting land from those who had more than they needed to give to their poorer brethren but what he discovered was that without tools and resources the land was soon sold back to landowners and abandoned for jobs in the cities. Vinoba recognized that his approach was failing because the land was given to individuals rather than villages. A village gift system or what was known as the Gramdan movement subsequently evolved and all donated land was held by villagers in common and leased to those capable of working it. The Gramdan movement was the prototype upon which Swann developed the modern CLT model. He and others also studied Native American land tenure arrangements, biblical writings, the Jewish National Fund, which acquired lands in Israel for kibbutzim, the Mexican ejido system, the history of “the commons,” historical religious and intentional communities, and communal land tenure arrangements around the world.

The ancient pronouncements give clear instruction about what is acceptable and what is not. The Book of Leviticus, being just one example, is filled with admonitions about the individual’s right being limited by the interests of the community and future generations. The land belongs to God and is a gift with conditions attached. People must care for the land and not waste it or trade it away for profit, and every 50 years all land must be returned to its original owner at the time of the Jubilee so that a race of slaves and paupers does not arise. “The land shall not be sold forever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” (Lev 25:23)

St. Chrysostom wrote: “God gave the same earth to be cultivated by all. Since therefore his bounty is common, how comes it that you have so many fields and your neighbor not even a clod of earth?” And another early Christian father wrote: “The soil was given to the rich and poor in common. The pagans hold earth as property. They do blaspheme God.”

Pagan, heathen, savage, Indian, wilderness dweller…how the words have switched identities over the centuries. History, that well-preserved cache of gold nuggets that were probably never intended for generations hence, are so very instructive.

Robert Swann worked with Slater King, a cousin of Martin Luther King, to develop the first recognized CLT, New Communities, Inc., incorporated in 1968 in Leesburg, Georgia. New Communities Inc. was founded by people who were concerned with the land issue as it affected the security and opportunities of rural blacks throughout the south during the civil rights era. Swann and others traveled to Israel to study the Jewish National Fund, which was founded in 1901 to acquire land for Jewish settlement. They applied what they learned about leaseholding, legalities, and infrastructure to the new CLT and purchased 5,735 acres, primarily for agricultural purposes and affordable homeownership in order to obtain financial independence and self-sufficiency. They were very successful, and more CLT’s followed, in Appalachia, Maine, Washington, D.C., Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Vermont, California and New Hampshire. The community land trust movement was born.

The National Community Land Trust Network is holding their annual conference in Albuquerque, the week of November 8th, 2010. Anyone interested in CLT’s or wanting to form one should attend.

If anyone has land to donate for an emerging rural, self-sufficient, sustainable CLT, please contact Rebekah (contact info below).

To be continued next month, Part 4 will investigate modern community land trusts and the future of the CLT movement. This article is also available online at The Santa Fe New Mexican website http://www.santafegreenline.com/

Rebekah Zablud Azen is a long-time student of traditional indigenous lifeways, non-revisionist history, economics, and land tenure issues – passports to understanding humanity’s present predicament and enabling us to identify practical solutions for survival and restored balance in a new era. Rebekah can be reached at 505-424-9475 or rebekah@cybermesa.com.

Print PDF

Private Property – The American Dream
Coming to a new land where the institution of private property had never touched these shores, settlers and their descendants had an unprecedented, golden opportunity to not only question, but throw off the worst of feudalistic land tenure arrangements. However the opportunity for change was entirely lost.

The colonists were more than observers; they studied Native land tenure arrangements in an effort to find parallels (there weren’t any) with English property, organized as it was for exploitation and expropriation, in an effort to secure “legal title” to Native lands. It was apparent that Indian land tenure arrangements were entirely different from anything they had ever known. And the colonists were exposed to new philosophies about land tenure. As early as 1678, John Locke extolled the idea of “the natural right of land for all,” as part of Natural Law philosophy, and though he was influential in liberalizing politics, his pronouncements about land were ignored or muddied to advance the “right to private property” for the wealthy minority. By the time of the revolution, British contemporaries Thomas Spence and William Ogilvie, having witnessed the atrocious social ills generated by land engrossment, were engaged in radically questioning ingrained land tenure patterns. They sought change, but nothing took here.

In spite of this blindness, there was formidable protest against the feudalistic tyranny of the past, but it was riddled with “New World” hypocrisy. Thomas Jefferson, for example, went on record as “opposed to the private engrossment of land,” yet kept a bevy of slaves on his plantation following in the footsteps of his father who was a prominent land-grabber. The new elite on these shores, coming from the mercantilist class, simply re-created the old landholding structures with a few adjustments to the system, strictly born of the conditions which they encountered here, rather than a conscious acknowledgement of needed reform. Like a younger generation in vain protest of their elders’ ways, the colonists and their descendents managed to perpetuate the status quo under a new guise. The Americans only honed a land tenure system that operated for the benefit of the few, at the expense of the many.

As Sir Frederick Pollock noted in The Land Laws (1896), “And to this day, though the really characteristic incidents of the feudal tenures have disappeared…the scheme of our land laws can, as to its form, be described only as a modified feudalism.”

It was a land-feeding frenzy right from the start, beginning with the earliest joint stock companies, now known as “corporations,” such as the Plymouth Company and the Virginia Company, both formed in 1606. Though they were ostensibly organized for trading, they were really colonizing ventures; ownership of and profit from land were central to their enterprise. The momentum continued, and by the 18th century, speculation in land was huge. It was the investment game at the time, pre-Wall Street. Our “founding fathers,” President George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Patrick Henry, were notorious land speculators, and bought up land by the truckload at pennies an acre. Settlers, since the time of the Pilgrims, were invited onto the land, not for any humanitarian or “freedom of religion” reasons, but to raise the value of land through the improvements generated by their labor.

A central irony of the American experience is that democratic ideas and principles that shaped the US Constitution were originally observed in Native social organization, in particular the Iroquois Confederacy, but the newcomers, though they observed Native land tenure patterns just the same, chose not to imitate them. Their sole objective with regard to land was simply to obtain it, and that they did. All the lands of the US were transferred through purchase, trade, treaty, trickery, theft, coercion or force from the indigenous inhabitants to the newcomers in a span of just 300 years.

The present schism between political and economic democracy, which is so blatant, and accounts for so much misery, is due to this terrible lack of foresight and understanding of democracy in its wholeness, grounded in the equitable distribution and right relationship to land.

After two centuries of land grabbing, Alexis de Tocqueville, that astute observer of the American way, politely penned the following:

“In no country in the world is the love of property more active and more anxious than in the US; nowhere does the majority display less inclination for those principles which threaten to alter, in whatever manner, the laws of property.”

The history of land tenure in America is a long, fascinating story that cannot be told here, but suffice it to say that land acquisition, land “disposal,” first through European and then through state and federal government, land engrossment, land speculation, and land concentration, proceeded at a very rapid pace. But it was only the rich, the wealthy and the powerful who procured lands. They had the upper hand right from the start, and were either government officials or were assisted time and again by government. The masses of people, the landless working poor, were excluded from obtaining land. Finally, after more than 250 years and pressure by land reformers, the Homestead Act was passed in 1862 in an attempt to even the playing field. But it was soon to be seen, even by the government, as a wash and a miserable failure.

Land Rights and Land Reform in America
Contrary to modern opinion, the “third world” is not the only place where land rights and land reform efforts have taken place. US history began with Indian resistance, and has a long and distinguished record that persisted through five centuries right up to the present. Here in NM, the Pueblos courageously fought Coronado’s entrada in 1540, and the Spanish were sent packing back down the Rio Grande in the great Pueblo uprising of 1680. Hispano land grant struggles, mired as they are in complex layers of unjust land-grabbing, are a second layer of resistance. And today, Santa Fe County, and now Mora Valley residents are fighting off oil and gas corporations to preserve their land, water, health and way of life.

Early in the nineteenth century, land rights agitators such as Thomas Skidmore, George Henry Evans and Horace Greeley declared the unequal division of land the basis for social injustice. The following is a typical message from a handbill widely distributed by Evans and Greeley in 1848:

“Are you tired of slavery, of drudging for others, of poverty and its attendant miseries? Then vote yourself a farm.”

The labor movement rallied for the “liberal disposal of the public domain,” and the National Reform Association, which opposed land monopolization and every person’s right to own land, was formed along with the Free Soil Party, which secured 10% of the popular vote in the presidential election of 1848. Newly elected Abraham Lincoln said of pending homestead legislation that he was “in favor of settling the wild lands into small parcels so that every poor man may have a home.”

Due to mounting agitation and pressure by the populace for land, the Homestead Act became law in 1862. The law allowed citizens to acquire 160 acres of public land. The problem for landless Americans was that speculators had already consumed much of the choicest public domain before 1862, and rampant fraud dominated the entire process. In addition, much of the land was given to the railroads, colleges and the states; two-thirds of the land was not arable, and a portion was held for Indian reservations. Between 1860 and 1900, 600,000 homestead patents were issued, yet it is estimated that only one in six acres went from the government to farmer-settlers as intended. By the 1880 census, it was found that landlordism had become entrenched, and farm indebtedness and farmland concentration was on the rise.

Extraordinary land wealth continued to accumulate, and a new crop of land reformers arose, influenced by the violent labor struggles, riots and bloodshed following the widespread depression of 1873–1877. Indignation grew over the coexistence of monumental wealth and dismal poverty.

The most famous land reform spokesperson of the time was Henry George who noted in the progressive rise in land values the presence of an unearned increment which Ricardo had identified earlier in his “Law of Rent.” George subsequently wrote the masterpiece “Progress and Poverty” in 1879, in which he charted a new course for land reform based on the return of the unearned portion of land rent back to society rather than to the landowner. He argued for the imposition of a tax, a single tax on land (while eliminating the tax on labor) to absorb the unearned increment that would provide ample revenue for the operation of government. George effectively identified the fundamental reason for the gross disparities in the distribution of wealth and provided a simple solution, a single tax on land. He discovered a principle of such immense importance that it should put all economists before him to shame. His book became a bestseller and attracted the attention of scholars, statesmen, and the general public both here and abroad for decades, and remains to this day a classic.

At the turn of the century, the conservation movement spearheaded by John Muir coincided with growing public sentiment opposed to the continued expansion of special interests getting an unfair share of land and natural resources. An enormous amount of public land was nationalized, but unfortunately, once again, the wealthy and the corporations prevailed; our public lands became grossly privatized for ranching, mining, forestry, and the oil and gas industries. “Public lands” in many respects are not “public” (only in that we support them through taxes), and they do not consistently serve public interests, but largely profit private industry.

There were other land reform efforts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries but the momentum suddenly stopped around 1940 when there was no more land left to be had, and the nation had largely turned from agrarian to urban. The national discourse changed from “land reform” to “agrarian reform,” meaning better productivity of land and better management of resources rather than alteration of the fundamental disparities in land ownership.

A curious thing happened at the same time. “Land ownership” morphed into “homeownership,” a shift that can be traced to President Hoover’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership in 1931, and the revolution in credit, which fostered the “illusion of homeownership and fulfillment of the American dream.” Residential mortgage debt grew from $2.9 billion in 1900 to $260 billion in 1965, and homes became the largest single item of credit in the new debt-based economy.

Perhaps this scenario is now sounding familiar…lack of land availability, continually escalating and unaffordable land prices, land-reform-a-foreign-concept, skyrocketing mortgage debt, and unaffordable homeownership.

From the 1930’s on, amnesia about land rights and land reform descended, but it took one last brilliant turn in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s with the appearance of the Community Land Trust land reform model. The little flame has been lovingly tended by a handful of dedicated souls for the past few decades, awaiting its new dawn.

Affordable Housing and Land Reform
Living in an urban environment obscures our relationship to land, and so we don’t think in terms of land rights and land reform as people in agrarian societies do, being that their sustenance and survival is dependent on land in a very direct way. They do not have industrial economies and jobs to fall back on as we do to cushion the loss.

Our landlessness is not anything we ever consider. We only think in terms of jobs and employment, something we have come to expect. The job pays the rent, it pays the mortgage. Should there be an economic downturn, then we’re simply “out of luck.” We are conditioned to believe that the gods or some amorphous gravitational force sets the economy in motion, which is beyond our human control and that there is nothing we can do beyond creating jobs, jobs, and more jobs, while land gets eaten away for more factories, industries and businesses that produce endless supplies of needless consumptive garbage. And the price of land steadily rises.

The fact of the matter is that land issues never go away just because we think they’re gone. The dis-equitable distribution of land and the problems generated by this reality are always with us. The crisis in affordable housing is just one manifestation of the problems generated, and it affects everyone.

Since land is the number one obstacle to affordable housing, there is only one route forward, land reform. There are many types of land reform, but the one that can best assist the rapid development of affordable housing for the most people with the least amount of time, energy and expense, the one has been implemented successfully in communities around the country for over 40 years, is the Community Land Trust (CLT). That is not to say that other types of land reform cannot assist us in achieving the same goal. They can.

Other land reform models include:

a) limit the amount of land anyone can own
b) directly transfer lands that are not being used when there are people in need of land
c) adopt land-value-capture policy as articulated by Henry George where the unearned increment of land value is taxed and goes back to the people, instead of into the hands of private land owners (models exist throughout the world, implemented to some extent)
d) emulate public institutions such as the Alaska Permanent Fund, a public fund of revenues generated from oil and gas reserves owned and held in common by the people, and returned to the people (though not so good for the environment)
e) nationalize land (this is very problematic as experienced by a number of African nations since their “independence,” because exploitation of land and people have been exacerbated with corporate takeovers, courtesy of government-ownership of land)
f) shift the tax burden to land for large landowners and off of small homesteaders and off of labor (very enlightened policy)
g) legislate the constitutional rights of nature (this one is a beauty though not directly land reform).
“In September 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to declare constitutional rights to nature, thus codifying a new system of environmental protection. Reflecting the beliefs and traditions of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, the constitution declares that nature “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution. The new constitution redefines people’s relationship with nature by asserting that nature is not just an object to be appropriated and exploited by people, but is rather a rights-bearing entity that should be treated with parity under the law. “

The best models don’t just redistribute land or put it into new hands, but change the underlying land-tenure structure. Many of the models don’t do this. They provide a temporary or limited fix. Land-value-capture, land taxation models, and revenue capture from public control of resources do redistribute wealth, which is a worthy goal, but they do not alter underlying land-tenure arrangements based on exploitation and expropriation (private property). The best models reject the commodification and privatization of land and promote access to land as a basic human right for all.

Land is life and we are a part of the land. It owns us and not the other way around. Anyone can observe this most basic truism. The land owns us and not “we own the land.” We all come from the land and to that we shall return. We are all dependent on the land which nurtures and sustains all of us, and all generations, for all time.

All the problems that private property engenders, from rising land values to unaffordable housing, servitude, poverty, environmental degradation, war, and all the social ills, have no foothold where land has not become “property.” The best land reform models acknowledge our natural, proper and right relationship to land and are inherently democratic examples of collective, respectful stewardship.

Before investigating Community Land Trusts, there is one more very important land tenure model that can’t be labeled “land reform” because it was never a reaction to land commodification, the parallel being socialism as a reaction to capitalism. Nineteenth century socialism was a reaction and a response to inequitable economic arrangements, and land reform efforts were its corollary. But we can forget about actions and reactions and start from the beginning, because right here in New Mexico, we are blessed with some of the oldest land-tenure arrangements anywhere; pre-Anglo, pre-Mexican, pre-Spanish, pre-feudal and pre-conquest.

The Pueblo people are our window to the future. They have amazingly maintained communal land tenure patterns over five centuries of conquest. Though they have lost much of their land, they have not capitulated to Western land tenure patterns. The Pueblos are not for sale, and nobody owns them. They have their own internal rules for land distribution and use, and the land is sacred. It exists to support all life, and is not a commodity to be bought and sold for personal gain. The Pueblo cultures and languages have survived because they kept their promise, oath and loyalty to the land, our Mother Earth. The people can go home. There is a home, and there’s no landlord waiting outside to evict them. They can live, survive and flourish from the land. We newcomers, we younger siblings, have a great deal to learn from them, and maybe this time ‘round we can get it right.

To be continued next month. Part 3 will investigate the Community Land Trust model, the foundation of affordable homeownership. This article is also available online at The Santa Fe New Mexican website http://www.santafegreenline.com/

Rebekah Zablud Azen is a long-time student of traditional indigenous lifeways, non-revisionist history, economics, and land-tenure issues – passports to understanding humanity’s present predicament that enable us to identify practical solutions for survival and restored balance in a new era. Rebekah can be reached at 505-424-9475 or rebekah@cybermesa.com

Print PDF

The ostensible purpose of this series of articles is to provide a clear road map through which a person of whatever means can obtain sufficient and adequate housing that is:

• truly affordable for this generation and all future generations, freeing us from a lifetime of servitude
• self-sufficient in supplying all of our essential needs, disconnected from typical “life support systems”
• environmentally sound, neither extracting precious resources nor polluting the earth.

There are many other important benefits to this approach that can positively impact the individual and the society, but more importantly, there are profound implications for our future that will be discussed in the summary.

Link to Full “Kidnapped by the House” series by Rebekah Azen

–

Non-native-English speakers have a way of putting things that highlight what we often don’t see because we’re trapped by conventional perspectives. The “kidnapped” commentator wrote:

“I live in Shanghai, a modern city. The house price is much high than ever. It seems all the people in the city are working for the house. They need to work for their whole life to pay back the debt of the bank. All their money and resources have been kidnapped by the house.”

What could be more illustrative of the situation than the pronouncement that everyone is “kidnapped by the house?”

Shanghai has a highly advanced industrial economy, and as part of China is the third largest economy in the world, so why is it that half-way around the globe, here in the US, the majority of people are trapped by this same phenomena, working their entire lives away to pay for shelter? It’s no secret that the cost of housing in the city of Santa Fe and far beyond is outrageously expensive, and an entire army of Santa Feans commutes daily to Rio Rancho or the “provinces” to find relief. Contrary to official announcements, and self-evident to all is the fact that it’s not just the poor that can’t afford a home; it’s most everyone.

Our idea of “affordable” has grown a nose like Pinocchio. Why don’t we just call a spade a spade and get real about the price of home ownership, whether it be an “affordable” $200,000 home or a typical median priced home at $335,000? The truth is that neither is affordable.

But the price tag on the house is just the beginning. We are forced to add the parasitic appendage of a 30-year mortgage because no one has enough money to pay up front. Most can’t even scrape together a down payment. So what’s the final tab on “affordable” and median priced homes at a low 6 percent interest rate over a 30-year period with ten percent down (more than most people can afford)? Our final bill comes to an alarming $408,509 and $684,255 respectively, and that doesn’t include tax and insurance.

So how do we pay for the necessity of housing? Labor. Years and years of labor. Typically, it now takes two full-bodied persons working thirty years or more to pay off a mortgage. Homeownership, whether “affordable” or not, translates into a modern day form of servitude. Why do we remain in a state of denial about the real price of housing and passively accept this egregious state of affairs? Why must we work all of our lives to simply have a roof over our head and a place to call home? How did things get to be this way?

A Short History of Land Tenure
For most of human habitation on this planet, land was free, and so was housing. There was no rent, no landlords, and no mortgages. Traditional, tribal, communal relationship to land was the norm for millennia but that arrangement was violently shattered where the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome arose. Roman law codified property rights for the first time, setting the stage for everything to come. As the Middle Ages opened, when the earliest tribal arrangements transformed into the village folkmote (old English term for the natural gathering and self-governance of people) of Europe, communities shared land, and from “the commons” took what they needed for agriculture, hunting and gathering, fishing, pasturing animals, and building homes.

The feudal usurpation of traditional land tenure patterns forced peasants from the village folkmotes into supporting the manors of the wealthy through a measure of tribute, typically the produce they grew in the fields, before the cash economy unfolded. Later, the peasants paid their lords in cash. When the peasants didn’t have enough to pay what the lords demanded, they borrowed from them and became indebted, whereby the lords could exact more and more toil without relief. This is undoubtedly the precursor of the “mortgage system” that originated in 12th century England. Common law was designed to protect the creditor, allowing him to take the debtor’s property if what was owed was not paid. The word “mortgage” comes from Latin and means “death or dead pledge;” either it was a “dead pledge” when paid off or was a “death pledge” for the debtor.

The further unfolding of the story brings us to the period of “enclosures” that followed in Europe, a time when peasants, en masse, were forced off the land. Enclosures of land were literally that; the fencing off of land by landowners to make way for the burgeoning sheep industry, which was more profitable than what the peasants supplied through traditional agriculture. The peasants were thus made homeless and landless. Many starved to death and were forced into laboring in the emerging industrial economy of the towns and cities to support themselves. None of this transpired peacefully; there were scores of land revolts, uprisings and rebellions.

The radical transformation in land tenure arrangements that took place from the Middle Ages on, transformed communal land into land as a commodity and private property, while at the same time concentrated vast land-holdings into the hands of a relative minority. This is the basis of all Western land-tenure arrangements ever since in all of Europe’s colonies and everywhere Western domination spread across the globe, including the US. It is also the root cause of endless, non-stopable, escalating land prices and the universal dilemma of the unavailability of land for people and un-affordable housing.

Santa Fe is not alone. All areas of the world today are suffering from this history. Some areas suffer to a much greater extent than we do with rampant landlessness, unemployment and starvation wages, homelessness and slums, malnourishment, hunger, disease, war and death.

Who Owns the World?
Many people know about the severe disparities in wealth; for example that fewer than three hundred multi-billionaires now have as much wealth as three billion people – half the population on Earth at this time. What is little known is an important corollary – a very small minority own most of the land on the planet. The majority population (60% to 90%) in every inhabited country are landless; they own no part of the planet whatsoever, not even their own homes. The richest 5% in every nation, rich and poor, North and South, East and West, now own between 70% and 95% of their own countries. The last survey of New Mexico (1983) revealed that 5% of the population held 90% of the
private land.

Land, and not employment, provides the means for the necessities of life: shelter (from the natural elements), heat (from wood, sun, etc.), food (hunted, gathered or cultivated), and security (you can’t be evicted). The reason that poverty and hunger is so pervasive throughout the world is due to the fundamental problem of landlessness. The majority of the world’s peoples are landless. They are entirely dependent on employment but have little or no access to employment.

Susan George, author of How the Other Half Dies states, “The most pressing cause of the abject poverty which millions of people in the world endure is that a mere 2.5% of landowners with more than 100 hectares control nearly three-quarters of all the land in the world, with the top 0.23% controlling over half.

“Consider this… Without access to this planet and its resources you can neither eat, breathe, walk, sleep, work nor play. Land is more than somewhere to live – it is life itself. Without exception, everything around you, every single thing you use and consume in the process of leading your life are products of the land. These are the simple facts: If you have no land to live from, you are dependent on money to purchase the products of the land; if you have no money to live from, you depend on employment to gain the money; if you have no employment, then dependent on the State; if the State refuses you, you beg for the charity of the rich; no charity, you steal or you die. Such is the chain which binds us to each other, and to the land.”
BEarthright

Closer to home, the 2006-2008 US Census provides the following statistics; just 22% of the population own a home outright and pay no mortgage. An astounding 78% either rent or are indebted on a mortgage, and many are “underwater” (owe more on the mortgage than what the house is worth). More than three quarters of all Americans are literally urban peasants with no land and no domicile that is truly their own.

In NM, the statistics are very similar; 27% own a home outright and 73% either rent or owe a mortgage. What is interesting about NM is that people in the lowest income bracket, $10,000-$25,000, had the highest percentage of home ownership, and not the wealthy. 64.1% of the people who own homes outright make under $50,000 a year. Why is this? Could it be that the Spanish and Mexican land grants and tribal reservations provided (and still provide) some protection from the breakup of land and accompanying land price escalation for local Native American and Hispano families?

So, think about it. Who has land? Do you? How many people do you know that have land? Just how secure are you as a laborer in a capitalist economy now experiencing free-fall in a typical depression cycle? How secure is your job and what guarantee do you have that the government will supply jobs and bring down the all-time-high unemployment rolls? Their record thus far has not been reassuring.

What government program insures you and your home mortgage against losses? Why is it that the government has been promoting long-term mortgages since the 1930’s and insuring lending institutions against losses with public monies for just as long? Why was Fannie Mae established to purchase FHA insured loans to be sold as securities on the financial markets? Why has the government been taking money in the form of taxes from the people and lending it back to the people in the form of mortgage loans so that money lenders prosper? The bankers and government shills keep shouting their old refrain in our ears… “Access to credit is very important to economic growth and development.” Yes, we say, but whose economic growth and development are you speaking of?

Land, the Number One Obstacle to Affordable Housing
Access to land that is affordable is the number one obstacle to affordable housing. When land is commodified and privatized, land price escalation is inevitable economic law as articulated in the “Law of Rent,” the brainchild of economist David Ricardo in the early 19th century. Land is a limited commodity that always rises in value due to the desirability of its location, its natural amenities, its proximity to an urban environment and its scarcity (exaggerated by the artificial scarcity produced through land speculation). But the overriding factor in land price escalation, which unfortunately is entirely overlooked, is the collective value of human labor through time; all the people who have lived and worked in the vicinity make that city or that place what it is, and directly cause land values to rise. No one person should be able to skim off the proceeds of unearned income for him/herself just because that person can afford to own land, but that’s how the land system is presently structured. As land prices rise, some are profiting while others are delivered further into servitude. An economic downturn may decrease land prices for a time, but the movement overall is always up. It cannot be otherwise in a land-tenure system organized for private profit and not for the purpose of supporting life.

The fundamental problem for the majority of people is that land values rise far more rapidly than wages. Wages simply stagnate or rise very little over time. The living wage battle here in Santa Fe is a testament to how hard it is to boost wages.

Accurate statistics that document the rise in land values over time for the city of Santa Fe are difficult to obtain because no agency or organization has been keeping track. The closest approximation is to observe the changes in the median price of a home. The following figures were obtained from the Santa Fe Association of Realtors and show the median price of a home in the city from 1999–2005.

1999 – $191,875
2000 – $203,437
2001 – $221,375
2002 – $249,450
2003 – $270,375
2004 – $344,100
2005 – $398,110

In a space of just six years, the median home price rose an astounding 107%. In other words, the price of a home more than doubled. In contrast, through an overlapping period between 1990 and 2000, wages in the city of Santa Fe rose just 3.7% according to the US Census.

The menace of stagnant wages, together with inflation, regressive taxation, and a million other ways the populace is bilked all contribute to the mix of declining purchasing power, but the unrelenting rise in land prices is deadly. There’s no end to this scenario as long as the economy continues to breathe. There’s no stopping this runaway train. We’re always on the losing end of the game, even as we try to implement difficult and contentious “affordable housing solutions” that require endless infusions of money from the public treasury, as all the while we are falling further and further behind.

It is noted in a 2002 Santa Fe New Mexican article that 76% of households in Santa Fe can’t afford a median-priced home, and 50% of Santa Feans are eligible for some form of housing assistance. That’s pretty alarming. Can the quality of life in our city survive as the exodus of people continues, and millions of dollars in tax revenues vacate with them? The long-view concern however is that the economic well being of our descendants will continue to deteriorate as they will be forced to pay even more than we do for housing over time, and even a 30-year death pledge, which appears to be the common denominator for everyone today, rich and poor, still won’t be enough. Their economic condition will deteriorate to the point that they will be completely impoverished and forced to live as our neighbors do across the border.

As city dwellers, with most of our needs supplied (if only through credit), we have lost touch with our fundamental relationship to land and have been lulled into a false sense of
security. We perpetuate the myth that affordable housing is only a problem for the homeless, the aged, those with special needs, or those making 80%, 60%, or 50% of median income. But the myth will not sustain us and we must come to grips with economic realities. Affordable housing is a problem for all of us, and the roots of this problem go deep, centuries and
centuries deep.
To be continued next month.
Part 2 will investigate land reform; specifically community land trusts, the foundation of affordable homeownership. This article is also available online at The Santa Fe New Mexican website http://www.santafegreenline.com/

Rebekah Zablud Azen is a long-time student of traditional indigenous lifeways, non-revisionist history, economics, and land-tenure issues—passports to enable us to identify practical solutions for survival and restored balance in a new era. She can be reached at 505.424.9475
or e-mail: rebekah@cybermesa.com

Print PDF