WALDO COUNTY BACK-TO-THE LAND TRUST MANIFESTO:
Here are some thoughts on this land trust thing I've been mulling over...
I want to homestead. By homestead, I mean build a small off-grid cabin and garden. I would need 1-2 acres to do this, plus some wild areas to bang around in and forage.
I am having trouble finding a place to do that. The most traditional method would be to buy a piece of land. I can afford a down payment for a small parcel and handle the mortgage. But I wouldn’t have much money left to build anything. And I don’t want a small parcel in the midst of a bunch of other small parcels, which might not agree with or develop in a way conducive with my way of life. I also can’t afford to buy anything big enough to own my own wild space.
The problem is this. Back-to-the-landers came to the Belfast area back in the 70s and 80s. Their presence made this area cool. Waldo County is a great place to homestead. MOFGA, Unity College, the Belfast Co-op, Fedco. But this is changing. There is pressure for more corporate development, along the lines of MBNA, the hospital, Job Lots, etc. As these kinds of “amenities” come to this area, land prices will likely escalate. This will price out the young, the artistic, the eccentric, and those who simply are unwilling or unable to do what it takes to make money in our present system. They will be replaced with the old, the well-off, the main stream. And the character of this place will be lost.
We need to take control of what is being done with the land. Without some sort of intervention, the private real estate market dictates our development, in the above way. We can wait around or agitate for government to intervene and do something, though the likelihood of that seems slight. Government occasionally sets aside land for a park, but there is little or no government intervention having to do with how people are able to obtain and live on the land.
The alternative is to organize and do it ourselves. The way that private citizens can obtain land and then dedicate it to a higher purpose is through the mechanism of community land trusts. Community land trusts are non-profit organizations. CLTs obtain land to use for a mission in perpetuity, thereby permanently removing it from the private real estate market. CLTs are well established and wide spread mechanisms for obtaining and using land for higher purposes. For instance, there are a number of CLTs in the area that obtain land for wilderness preservation – Coastal Mountains Land Trust for example. Maine Farmland Trust’s mission is to encourage agriculture as a viable economic pursuit in Maine, and they obtain land for that purpose. It is sold or leased to would-be farmers at below market rates. They remove land from the private market and distribute it in ways that further their mission. In many urban areas CLTs are used to provide affordable housing.
My hope is that there is a place in Waldo County for another kind of land trust, between wilderness preservation and commercial farming. The mission of this trust would be to obtain land and make it affordably available to (low-income?) people for sustainable living. The parcels could be single lots, or big parcels that are split up into separate leaseholds. The basic framework would look like this: People can rent anywhere from 1-5 acres from the trust, for a low, per acre amount ($100 an acre for example). They can have a simple small homestead, or rent more for small scale farming, etc. With large enough parcels, a portion could be set aside as wild space for recreation, foraging, sustainable wood harvesting, etc. There is no down payment, no big up-front cash requirement. The reason for this is that people can then save their capital for setting up their homestead. The leases are long-term and basically permanent (99 year), as long as they live within a set of rules that ensures sustainable development. I imagine the rules to look something like this:
- a square footage limitation on dwelling size (maybe 1 person = 600 square feet, 100 square feet per additional person
- off grid (people can provide their own power through solar, wind, etc.)
- no pesticide use – strictly organic gardening and farming
- no septic systems – gray water and composting toilet systems only
The major hurdling blocks to going back to a simple way of life are the usual requirement in the private market of a big down payment and high overhead, depending on the price of the land and the resulting mortgage. The land trust with long-term lease scenario eliminates both of these. There is no down-payment, and rents are kept as low as possible (how to determine rent is a question – enough to cover taxes/maintenance? What about money for the land trust to acquire more land? Is there a way to determine an amount that allows for some profit to go back towards the mission without defeating the mission?...). People may actually pay more over their lifetime, since there is nothing to “pay off” as with a mortgage, just an ongoing rent. But this a pretty good trade considering the benefit: people are enabled to live a homesteading lifestyle immediately, without a years-long delay to acquire the capital for a down payment and then many more years of full time work to pay off a mortgage.
This trust would basically be a form of “affordable housing” – but instead it’s affordable land for sustainable living.
