Housing for People, Not for Profit: Models of Community-Led Housing

Editors and authors:

Lisa K. Bates (editor of this Interface collection)
Ren Thomas
Anna Hope
Mary Taylor
Tom Chance
Ruoniu (Vince) Wang & Emily Thaden
Jeffrey Lowe
Hilary Malson

Summary of this issue of Interface

The May 2022 edition of Interface is a collection of 7 essays exploring how community-led housing - an innovative alternative to the market-led housing sector - can help solve the crisis of unaffordable housing on both sides of the Atlantic.

As Linda Bates explains in her introduction, the authors of this collection offer many useful concepts, tools and models for how community housing can be built and sustained, drawing on examples from the UK, Canada and the US.

She notes the breadth of contributions, which range from Ren Thomas: “observing the housing crisis in Canada, and the need to turn from exchange value to use value”, and Anna Hope: “echoing the call for more creativity and flexibility to create community housing models in England” to Tom Chance, who: “writing about England’s Community Land Trust (CLT) movement… suggests that land ownership and the planning system could embrace the concept of commonwealth”.

She also notes Wang & Thaden, Lowe, and Malson who examine: “the roots of the Community Land Trust in the US Civil Rights Movement and Black liberation politics” and by doing so “represent a spectrum of thinking about how community-owned housing can be a foundation for social justice and political mobilization.”

As Linda Bates concludes: “shifting not only our mindsets but our policy and planning systems from housing for profit to housing for people will require social movement and political action…” yet “this Interface makes clear that we do know how to create resilient housing forms where people can be stably and safely at home, if we can create the will to make it happen.”