Building Alternatives: Community Land Trusts, Neoliberal Governance, and Transforming Housing Relations

Abstract

This thesis examines the use of community land trusts as a model of affordable housing delivery, and as a potential component of transformative interventions in the capitalist housing market. Drawing on a Marxist political-economic perspective, and concretely analyzing CLT projects in Vermont and Massachusetts, I ask whether these cases show the capacity for the CLT model to facilitate a move away from housing's embeddedness within forms of neoliberal governance. Looking specifically at their institutional and monetary relationships to systems of displaced survival, marketization of governance, and the state's allocation of social surplus, I argue that although both projects have made significant gains in addressing displacement, and have had uneven but notable success in politicizing otherwise depoliticized and marketized governance, they remain ultimately embedded within the capitalist market and the state through its distribution of social surplus. Based on their histories of contesting the allocation of this surplus, however, and the terms of their relationships to state and capitalist actors, I suggest that these cases further highlight the centrality of political contestation in evaluating the potential of these projects.