Beni comuni urbani e strategie antigentrificazione: il Community Land Trust

The development of a city implies the transformation and renovation of its places. Neighbourhoods once degraded change their aspect: restructured houses and new services make the area become more appealing. But all this has a cost, in the true sense of the world. The huge investments necessary to implement improvements in cities can only be sustained by big entrepreneurs, whose aim is to make profit from their investments. This logic influences the character of improvements: they will be done only in the areas with a big potential value, so that, once the renovations are completed, profit rates are high. This triggers a speculative mechanism, according to which improvements will cover the areas where the rent gap – the difference between the potential ground rent level and the actual ground rent of a certain place – is sufficiently high, leaving to degrade unprofitable areas and ignoring worthy of note but not enough lucrative projects. The effects such mechanism affect the population living in the restructured areas, that, due to the huge raise of the prices, cannot afford anymore to buy or rent a house and end up to be displaced. This phenomenon is called gentrification, and contrary to what one may think, is not a fruit of globalisation, but exists for much longer, and is constantly evolving. This thesis starts from describing the aspects of this phenomenon, its history and evolution through time and in different areas of the world. Then, it addresses on its main consequence: the housing crisis. From analysing how gentrification affects such crisis and how the vitious circle is created and alimented by bad housing policies, we will arrive to the potential solutions: how this vitious circle can be not only stopped, but also transformed into a virtuous circle. Here the core of this thesis comes into play: the Community Land Trust (CLT). A CLT is a non-profit organization that aims to ensure access to the house within a given territory in perpetuity. This is possible through the separation of the property of the soil (that remains to the CLT) and the one of the buildings above it (that is transmitted from owner to owner), that has two consequences: first, it significantly reduces the purchase price for the acquirents, that can access to housing at prices lowered respect to the market ones; and second, allows the CLT to subtract these lands to speculative uses and to valorise them according to the community needs. Moreover, inhabitants of CLT are directly involved in the decision making thanks to the CLT’s participate governance. This helps to create a sense of community. Born in the USA in the 1970s, this model nowadays diffused in many other areas of the world. After analysing the features of the CLT model in the American system, we will move our attention to Italy, where policies have always been hostile to a socialization of the land and attempts at measures aimed at this have produced little results. We will analyse the legal mechanisms and instruments through which the implementation of the CLT is actually possible, so much so that, a CLT project has taken hold and will be realized. We are talking about the Community Land Trust project portrayed by Fondazione Comunità Porta Palazzo in the neighbourhood of Aurora in Turin, that will be the object of the last chapter, which is in collaboration with this foundation and its vice-president Karl Kraehmer, who, answering to some question about the project, will explain how a CLT project is step by step put into practice and how the neighbourhood will benefit from it.