Taking Land Off the Market to Make the City Affordable
Channel: Center for CLT Innovation
Date: 2022-11-09

This event took place in Brussels, Belgium on October 28, 2022, and was presented by Community Land Trust Brussels, in collaboration with Perspective.Brussels, World Habitat, VUB/ Cosmopolis, Brussels Centre for Urban Studies and Brussels Academy.

SPEAKERS
Thibault Leroy, coordinator of the CLTB. In 10 years, CLTB has demonstrated the potential of the model in Brussels, and its complementarity with other housing actors. Should it remain a «niche» actor, or can it play a more important role?

Brenda Torpy. With Bernie Sanders, then Mayor of the City of Burlington, she founded the Champlain Housing Trust. With the support of the city, the trust has grown into one of the largest CLTs in the United States. CHT manages owner occupied homes, rental properties, parks, commercial spaces, housing cooperatives, homeless housing, and much more. In 2008, they won the World Habitat Award.

Mariolga Julia Pacheco works for the Caño Martín Peña CLT in Puerto Rico. This CLT is the result of the struggle of the inhabitants of an informal neighborhood in the Puerto Rican capital, San Juan. They succeeded in making the 80 hectares of land in a neighborhood near the city center the common property of all residents, raising a barrier against encroaching gentrification. In 2015, they won the World Habitat Award.

Vanesa Valiño, head of the housing alderman’s office in Barcelona. The city of Barcelona has many similarities with Brussels, including the great lack of social housing and the sharp rise in housing prices that is pushing the poor and more and more middle-income people out of the city. The city is developing a range of initiatives to address this. One of them is the creation of a municipal CLT, which is intended to serve as a basis for cooperative and social housing projects.

Thomas Dawance, researcher at the VUB. He studied closely the CALICO project in Forest, inaugurated in 2021. This project is innovative in many ways. It contains, among other things, the first cooperative homes on CLT land in Brussels. It was one of the inspirations for the Housing Deal, an initiative of the Brussels network Sohonet, which aims to take land off the market and facilitate the development of cooperative housing projects.