Opening the Commons: Community Land Trusts as a Strategy for Geoist Land Reform

Geoists hold that we have strong moral and economic reasons to equalize the rents of land, for example, by taxing its economic value and allocating the proceeds as a universal basic income. It is widely recognized among economists that such land value taxes are uniquely efficient and equitable. But despite its moral and economic virtues, the policy has proven politically intractable, as it would diminish the capitalized value of land as an asset. In this article, I explore an alternative strategy for socializing these land rents, using Community Land Trusts (CLTs). These could generate a bottom-up mechanism for rent redistribution that circumvents some political challenges to land value taxation. However, I argue that they may still remain vulnerable to problems of regulatory capture and rent-seeking. The paper integrates normative theory, public choice economics, and institutional design, and draws upon historical case studies to illustrate and evaluate the strategy’s viability.