“I don't think anybody’s ever been to scale:” the imperative for growth and the implications of scale for Community Land Trusts in Minnesota, USA

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the scalar logics of Community Land Trusts, nonprofits that work to facilitate affordable housing and promote community control of local development. Like many nonprofits, CLTs face a tension between assumed efficiencies that come with larger size on one hand, and the assumed responsiveness to community stakeholders that comes with smaller size on the other. Through an examination of CLTs in Minnesota, USA that included over 100 interviews with CLT stakeholders, we explore how CLTs understand and operationalize scale as they attempt to grow. Various CLT stakeholders adopt distinct (sometimes implicit) functional scalar logics for CLTs. This leads to growth strategies which are articulated as scalar but which are not clear about which registers of scale will be altered. In particular, we identify four key registers of scale for CLTs: organizational, jurisdictional, service area, and community identity. These do not always shift in lock-step; but because CLTs are trusts that own portfolio properties in perpetuity, we suggest that changes in the relationships between these registers pose larger risks for CLTs than for many other kinds of nonprofit service organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Community land trusts
• scale
• growth
• affordable housing
• community organizations

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all of the participants in the research in Minnesota. We would especially like to thank current and former staff of the CLTs that we studied, without whom this research would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

The human subjects research described in this paper was approved by the Clark University Institutional Review Board’s Human Subjects Committee, Protocol #:2012-081; The Rutgers University Office of Research and Sponsored Programs Protocol # 14-695M; and the Florida State University Human Subjects Committee HSC # 2014.12984.

Notes

1 In addition to community economies, alternative economies, and diverse economies, scholars also use terms like cooperative economies, and solidarity economies. While they are not synonyms, the distinctions between them are beyond the scope of our argument (but see Schmid and Smith (2021), who note that some types advocate more transformational practices than others). We will use “community economies” to highlight an orientation to building and supportive community decision-making, a central tenet of CLTs.

2 Shelterforce is the trade magazine for practitioners in community development in the United States, available at https://shelterforce.org.

3 The geographical pattern of CLT portfolios offers an engaging line of inquiry about effectiveness of community control of development, and/or community identity. These questions are not principally scalar questions that we engage in this paper, and are beyond the scope of the data and discussion presented here.

4 Matthew Thompson (2020) identifies a related, yet different “magical number” of around 40–60 households required to sustain resident participation and community democracy in a housing cooperative.

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding support of the United States National Science Foundation, Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (project award # 1359826).