Shows
On Common GroundChapter 13 - A Watershed Land Trust in Honduras: Profile of Foundation Eco Verde Sostenible - Kirby White and Nola White (Read by Susan Alancraig)Susan Alancraig is a photographer, librarian and gardener. She has lived in Honduras, was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Uganda, has been on the board of Honduras Community Support Corporation since its inception – and she loves reading aloud!2020-05-2621 min
On Common GroundChapter 18 - The Best Things in Life are Perpetually Affordable: Profile of the Champlain Housing Trust, Burlington, Vermont - Brenda M. Torpy (read by Susan Alancraig)In 1984, the administration of Mayor Bernie Sanders helped to create the Burlington Community Land Trust, the first municipally initiated and municipally supported CLT in the United States. Now known as the Champlain Housing Trust (CHT), it has grown into the country’s largest CLT with a real estate portfolio of over 3000 units of permanently affordable housing and over 160,000 square feet of nonresidential space, scattered across a three-county service area. CHT’s story is told by its founding president, Brenda Torpy, who later became the organization’s longest-serving executive director.2020-05-2640 min
On Common GroundChapter 23 - A Reflection on the Bioethics of Community Land Trusts - María E. Hernández-Torrales (read by Susan Alancraig)Over the last fifty years, bioethics has become one of the most highly developed fields in the study of applied ethics. María E. Hernández-Torrales applies the general principles of bioethical analysis to make the case for a right to housing. She then applies the same principles to argue that the CLT is an “ethical model” insofar as it secures safe decent, and affordable housing for individuals, even as it takes into consideration the environmental, cultural, and social needs of the larger community.2020-05-2639 min
On Common GroundChapter 24 - Community Control of Land: Thinking Beyond the Generic Community Land Trust - Olivia R. Williams (read by Susan Alancraig)As the CLT model has grown and proliferated in the United States, it has strayed from its original purpose, according to Olivia Williams. Instead of being a mechanism for collective decision-making and long-term control by poor, working class, and marginalized people over the development of land, the model is increasingly perceived and promoted primarily as an economically efficient strategy for producing affordable housing. How did this happen? And what can now be done to return CLTs to being a movement for community control of land and housing, one that is accountable to “those on the frontlines of grassroots struggles”?2020-05-2629 min