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In 2021, the Kensington Market Community Land Trust (KMCLT) did an astonishing thing. After a protracted renoviction battle over the Toronto neighbourhood’s iconic Mona Lisa building, the KMCLT bought it from the would-be evictors. The rumoured plan to turn it into a cannabis hotel was foiled and the tenants of the 12 residential and five commercial units—including our beloved corner store, barbershop, and hat store—got to stay.

As KMCLT’s co-chair, I helped organize the community around the tenants, and it was satisfying to see the building go into communal hands. For months I’d walk past Kensington Avenue’s vintage shops and fruit stand with a feeling of elation. We bought the building!

KMCLT’s bold move is part of a burgeoning movement of community land trusts (CLTs) across Canada. CLTs are community-led organizations who remove land from the speculative real estate market and keep it affordable forever. They revive the idea of the commons and collective stewardship, and help governments fulfill their responsibility to house their citizens. They’re quickly emerging as one of the only reliable workarounds for people to find affordable housing—and to keep their neighbourhoods alive.

Like most CLT purchases, KMCLT, which is made up of tenants, neighbourhood residents, and other supporters, bought our building with a mix of government funding and a regular mortgage. The mortgage is taken out by the land trust, which uses the rents to pay it off. It’s the government funding that allows us to keep those rents affordable. As we pay off the mortgage, rents can even go down.

Despite attempts at a second acquisition, KMCLT still owns only one building. But the plan is to use equity to purchase other buildings, as fast as we can. The urgency reflects the housing emergency in Canada: for every new unit of affordable housing built, we lose 11. Those lost affordable homes put people on the street.

Still, from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust (DTES CLT), co-led by Indigenous and Japanese Canadian organizations, to Black-led CLTs in Nova Scotia, people are coming together to find solutions to the housing crisis. They are now bolstered by the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts, established in 2017. The group has over 40 member CLTs and four staff to support CLT development across Canada. “Urban, suburban, and rural communities reach out to the network regularly for guidance on developing a land trust,” director Nat Pace says.

The first meeting of Canadian CLTs on Canadian soil took place in Montreal in 2018, at a conference organized by the Milton Parc Citizens’ Committee. We toured Milton Parc and heard about the decades-long battle between the community and developers that led to the entire neighbourhood being cooperatively owned under the umbrella of a CLT. The key moment of that conference, however, was when we were challenged by an Indigenous activist to put land back at the core of the movement.

Collective stewardship requires releasing the death-grip private property has on our imaginations. Thinking about land, settlers must necessarily grapple with the fact that it’s stolen. If at that meeting in Montreal we were mainly white settlers talking about CLTs, that is no longer the case. In Northeastern Ontario, the Temiskaming District Community Land Trust is creating an Indigenous women-led CLT to provide Indigenous-designed affordable housing, while in Toronto and B.C., Indigenous land trusts are also taking shape.

The modern CLT movement began with New Communities Inc., an agricultural community formed in Albany, Georgia in 1969 by civil rights activists who believed that secure land tenure was key to Black liberation. Tapping into this idea, African Nova Scotian CLTs, such as Upper Hammonds Plains just outside Halifax and Down the Marsh in Truro, have formed to secure historic land claims. In Vancouver, Hogan’s Alley land trust honours the legacy of Strathcona’s Black community, displaced through racist city planning.

CLTs can encompass so many forms of land use. Cultural land trusts in Toronto and Vancouver have formed to preserve space for artists; The Northern Community Land Trust is creating affordable home ownership in Whitehorse; and, also in Toronto, the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust (PNLT)—the first of the resurgence of CLTs in Canada, having started in 2012—is saving rooming houses from renoviction. PNLT’s first acquisition in 2017 was the Milky Way Garden, which is stewarded by Tibetan refugees.

I’m inspired by the opportunity to rethink not only our relationship to land, but also the extractive capitalism that mines bonds between people. There’s a deep camaraderie between Canadian CLTs, which come out of neighbourhood battles against gentrification, displacement, and erasure of working-class immigrant communities. We learn about community—both its challenges and opportunities—and in turn we create a community for ourselves.

Governments are starting to listen: the recent federal announcement of a $1.5 billion Rental Protection Fund, designed for the acquisition of at-risk residential buildings, is a recognition that we can’t build our way out of the housing crisis, and that non-market housing is essential to keep housing affordable.

It remains to be seen how the Canadian movement will sustain itself over the long term. For now, CLTs offer communities a rare source of optimism in the ever-deepening housing crisis. It’s exciting to be part of it, and to know that anyone who wants to effect change in our relationship to land and community can be part of it, too.