Trust everybody, but cut the cards
Even while agreeing that better teacher pay is most likely also in order, I must respectfully disagree with S-Town Mike’s reactionary recoil against a community land trust for low income workers in St. Tammany.
Land trusts are imperfect, and certainly may be misconceived or mishandled, but done properly they can be a transitional step towards diminishing the farce that is allodial land ownership and reclaiming our common rights to use of the earth. They key of course is “what happens to the rent”?
In a geolibertarian society, the rent forms the basis of a Citizen’s Dividend. In our imperfect society, generically regarding plans such as the one proposed here, the rent in effect is still distributed to the people. This is done by reducing the burden on the residents of the land itself, and on the taxpayers who might otherwise have to subsidize the costs of “purchasing” that same land in order to facilitate low-income housing (essentially funneling tax dollars directly into the coffers of landlords and their bankers). So long as the rent is not profiting a landlord, it is not a form of feudalism, as Mike implies.
With regard to this particular plan, it is described as “a nonprofit group owning land that it leases to homeowners for a nominal fee”. Whether this plan qualifies as a good step towards a reclamation of the commons, or as just another scheme to profit landlords, is well informed by the accepted definition of “nonprofit”, but still depends significantly on the definition of “nominal”.
