About Community Field Notes
Community Field Notes is a collaborative project of the Community Ownership & Stewardship Impact Table (COSIT), initiated by the National Equitable Recovery Alliance, to strengthen the growing movement for community ownership and stewardship of local real estate.
Community Field Notes supports this work by connecting practitioners, organizations, and researchers through peer learning, community organizing, coalition building, and field-facing storytelling. We also curate and share new research, case studies, and tools emerging from the national community ownership field, bringing academic and on-the-ground learning together in one accessible space.
The goal is to help communities, especially low-wealth and BIPOC-led ones, share strategies, learn from one another, and build the systems that make long-term self-determination possible.
Communities of Practice are regional collaboratives that anchor this work locally. Each community of practice brings together community leaders, practitioners, and partners to address displacement, acquisition strategies, and community ownership challenges in their own cities.
Working alongside local organizations, these communities of practice are developing frameworks and support systems to confront both the micro and macro drivers of displacement—centering BIPOC leadership, building local resilience, and shifting control over land and property back to communities.
The Community Ownership & Stewardship Impact Table currently convenes communities of practice in two cities, which serve as pilot regional hubs for a growing national network of peer learning and collaboration. These pilots are testing shared tools, governance approaches, and peer learning models, with ongoing exchange taking place through our online “Community Field Notes” (Hylo) community to support cross-city collaboration and inform the structure for expanding to additional sites..
Communities of Practice
Why Community Stewardship & Ownership?
Community stewardship and ownership are not new ideas. Many Indigenous cultures have long understood land as a shared responsibility rather than a private asset. What’s new is how communities today are adapting these values to confront modern inequities in property ownership.
In the U.S., discriminatory housing policies, urban renewal, and the financialization of real estate have made property ownership increasingly inaccessible for BIPOC communities. At the same time, outside investors and market forces continue to shape neighborhoods without local input.
Community ownership and stewardship provide an alternative– restoring community control, keeping land affordable, and reinvesting local wealth where it belongs. It’s a strategy for both justice and stability, giving communities the tools to shape their own futures.
Land Control and Ownership: A Timeline
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Pre-colonization
The history of community ownership of land in the United States started with indigenous land stewardship practices.
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1778
The first treaty signed between a Native American Tribe, the Lenape, and the US government which was broken within weeks like countless others that followed, resulted in loss of land, disruptions to tribal culture, economy, and social structure, and set the legal precedents that continue to impact indigenous people today.
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1800-1900
Westward Expansion, Marshall Trilogy, and Manifest Destiny, which held that white Americans had the right, even the duty, to extend their civilization fueled the removal and genocide of Indigenous people, the expansion of enslavement, and the explicit restriction to only white people the ownership of land.
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1934
The National Housing Act created the practice of Redlining. Minority, particularly Black, neighborhoods, were deemed financially risky and unable to acquire favorable mortgages and loans denying them the pathway to home and property ownership.
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1944
Veterans of Color excluded from the G.I. Bill benefits, including subsidies for employment, home loans, and college education.
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1949
The Housing Act of 1949 kicked started urban renewal projects that disproportionately displaced low-income and minority, especially Black, communities in urban cores. It also enabled mass production of housing which by and large created homogeneous middle-class white suburbs.
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1956
National Interstate and Defense Highways Act: Highway construction accelerating White flight was a common weapon used to slice through and displace minority communities during this time and in doing so devalued the properties nearby.
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1968
The Fair Housing Act attempted to curb racist housing practices in sale and rent, but another ten years would pass, after the Equal Credit Opportunity act (1974) and Community Reinvestment Act (1977), before racist mortgage lending and redlining were legally prohibited. Fifty years later, many metropolitan areas remain just as segregated as they were in 1968.
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1969
New Communities Inc., the precursor of Community Land Trust (CLT), was established in Lee County, Georgia. Today, there are more than 300 CLTs in the country holding over 40,000 housing units.
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1970s - 1980s
Numerous acts in favor of financial deregulation led to shadow banking, speculation, and risky lending practices for the benefit of investors and shareholders. The same period also saw the start of systemic financialization of real estate with securitization and expansion of real estate investment trusts.
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1990
The HOME Program was created by the National Affordable Housing Act of 1990. It provides formula grants to states and localities that partner with local nonprofits to preserve and create affordable housing for rent or homeownership and to provide direct assistance to low-income residents. This was a turning point for the federal government in moving away from the public housing model to a private/public partnership model.
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2008
Unchecked real estate and housing financialization (like mortgage-backed securities) and subprime lending led to the financial crisis; $17 trillion ($22 trillion in 2023 dollars) of wealth was lost and 8 million homes were foreclosed.
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Futures
Communities stewarded and owned land and properties in service of everyone, especially the most vulnerable, that support the community spatially, socially, economically, and culturally
