Having land is, by all means, the biggest difference-maker possible. My family is an example.
My Memmaw, about 70 years ago, squirreled away until she could afford a $600 down payment on 16 acres in East Texas. The purchase didn't just allow for a place for her and my grandfather to raise their four children, it provided a plot for my great-grandfather to build his home. When my grandfather passed away at a young age, leaving the children for my Memmaw to raise, it allowed for her to provide them with some sort of consistency throughout their childhoods. The option without land would have likely been raising them in a two-bedroom apartment in Houston.
Later, my dad would build the home he’d eventually raise me in on that same 16 acres. It allowed him to eventually move back and start his own plumbing company, without the burden of having to afford a mortgage each month since the home he built was paid off.
Three years after Memmaw passed, my family members and I find ourselves teary-eyed when we’re thinking about her, not just her as the family’s former matriarch, but as our ultimate difference-maker. Her decision to use the last of her money to buy land lifted our family out of poverty.
Land is precious, in other words.
As gentrification threatens the livelihoods of some long-time Birmingham, Alabama residents, an effort to push back is underway. In particular, the effort comes in the form of the Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust, an initiative to restore the city’s historic Smithfield community. It’s being led by Susan Diane Mitchell, Salt, Soil, & Supper’s guest this week. Scalawag first partnered with the Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust in 2019 for our Pollution, Place, & The People panel and community discussion in our hub-city of Birmingham.
Once you’re finished reading up on our discussion about the value of land to communities in Alabama, check out my spring harvest below. Yes, dear readers, I’m very excited about it.
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 XP: I have to say, I’m fascinated with the concept of a land trust, but I guess I don’t know much about how one might work. Could you elaborate on that for me?
SM: Sure. It's actually a “community” land trust, because there are, of course, land trusts, but the word community is really important, so we use all three terms. It's basically a land rights movement and a right-to-home movement that began in the late 1960s with the civil rights movement in the South–in southwest Georgia, to be exact–with community land trusts that emerged called New Communities. It's still thriving to this day. It went through an incredible amount of challenges and tragedies. But the story of new communities is our inspiration, as well as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Those are two of our heroes of this movement. It was born out of the need for disenfranchised and dispossessed African Americans to have land, to create community, to create home, and to be safe. A community land trust basically takes land and puts it in community control. So, no one individual owns the land, per se. I don't even like to use the word “own,” but stewards the land. It's collectively stewarded and managed and the community decides how they want to use that land.
(See also: Housing Strategies that work for the South, in Scalawag)
We were inspired by the movement once we learned what it was, because it seemed to be a perfect strategy to protect our community here in Smithfield in Birmingham, Alabama, from what looked to be like inevitable gentrification and cultural erasure. Smithfield is a historically recognized community. Many civil rights leaders emerged from this community in the 1950s, in the 60s, including Dr. Angela Davis and Arthur Shores. In fact, I live right across the street from the Davis family home and was really sort of sitting here when I was at a crossroads in my life, about 10 years ago now. But really, my work started in 2015 [while I was] just looking out across my street from my porch, drinking tea, and thinking about the fact that Dr. Angela Davis, who I used in my thesis, grew up here–what does that mean? The whole concept of space, place, and meaning became really real for me and for the folks that I'm working with. That's how we started: we learned about the model through our education, through an organization called Magic City Agriculture Project. They helped get us trained, and knowledgeable. And when I suggested we go ahead and form a community land trust as a way to protect this community from being erased, that's when we instituted it in 2016. We've been working ever since, slowly but surely, to spread awareness, to educate the community about the model—that it's actually written into the western area framework plan for what the city is going to do, and that this is one of the best practices to make sure that there's equity when there is redevelopment of communities.
XP: I find that very impressive. Are there other examples of community land trusts like y’all’s across the Gulf Coast and U.S.? Or are y’all working with something wholly unique?
SM: In the network that we belong to, there's over 250 community land trusts. Beyond that, there's more that’s already been in this particular network. It is not an entirely foreign concept. It was born out of looking into community living, communal living, called a “kibbutz” in Israel, as the garden home movement in England, and marrying the particular needs of community members, African American community members, in the rural South. But it was really coming out of looking around the world at how people are able to live in better harmony with themselves and with the earth that really inspired the folks to move this movement along. So, there's particular principles and values associated with this movement. It's just a real solid way for folks [to make ends meet in certain situations], whether it's urban or rural, and if they find themselves being threatened with displacement because they can’t afford to pay taxes, or they can’t afford their rent or their mortgages, because the cost of land goes up astronomically, such as in the Bay Area where I grew up. It's over $1,000 a square foot right now. It's just beyond most working people's means. So, people are being moved way, way out into what we used to call the boondocks growing up, but really are these suburban centers, or enclaves. The city has become super gentrified, and it's been populated by super rich people, who can afford to price out folks that have been there for decades.
(See also: 'Can you imagine people ignoring all this if we were white?', in Scalawag)
My folks moved from the South to the Bay Area in the 1940s and were very instrumental in establishing community in Oakland and Berkeley. I grew up with a really rich Southern value system of Black people in the Bay Area. What I've found in the community land trust movement is that sort of echo of creating community, even under situations where my people were pretty much forced to migrate away from the South to escape a lot of oppression and threat of life. They were successful in establishing businesses–medical practices, law practices–in the Bay Area. So, it's really a movement of self-determination for one thing, but also joy and hope, even through the pain of folks that feel threatened by you or for whatever reason, or want to threaten you out of your happiness. Our land trust is a way to secure the pursuit of happiness, the right to the pursuit of happiness anyway, by having land rights.
XP: How would you describe the culture and community y'all building on the community land trust? Is it something different than what you've experienced before?
SM: Oh, that's a really good question, because I was deeply concerned about what I perceived could be cultural erasure if this community became gentrified and memorialized, meaning where the civil rights leaders live became more like museums rather than living breathing spaces.
For me, the sense of community is kind of retaining that, because once upon a time, Smithville was a totally self-contained community, meaning, because of Jim Crow and segregation, folks were forced to create what they needed right in their community, and it was thriving. Everything you could possibly need to live a good life you could find right here in Smithville. These days, I guess you could say it's a disinvested community. However, you can see that there's an encroach of new businesses. And not to make this too simplistic, but businesses that would cater more to white clientele than the folks that actually live in the community. There are also people who are buying the property here slowly but surely. And we have a land bank authority in the city that does not work in the needs of the community members, which it's designed to do; it's actually poised to sell off the city to the first bidders. It's really sad. But we've had an extended grace period here to really learn about what gentrification does and can do, what are the best practices to make sure there's equity with redevelopment and question the practices of redevelopment. We constantly question and challenge what's going on in our city, because we have a right to the city. So, our three aims of our particular community land trust are urban farming, regenerative housing, and community education. And by regenerative housing, we're interested in taking existing housing and retrofitting them with as close to net zero energy as possible, establishing networks of farming between the homes and between the land spaces, so that we can have more autonomy with our food systems, with the food apartheid that we live under, and with our ability to control our own reality to the best that we can.
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Southerly, The Current, Carly Berlin
“A state program aims to make COVID-19 vaccinations accessible to residents of southwest Louisiana, where vaccine rates are low and people are displaced.”
The Guardian, Sara Sneath
“Republicans and Democrats are introducing bills to push against Biden’s new restrictions on oil and gas companies.”
Tampa Bay Times, Josh Fiallo
“Florida is nearly two degrees warmer during winter months, according to the latest NOAA data.”
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The Texas Observer, The Texas Tribune, ProPublica, NBC News, Perla Trevizo, Ren Larson, Lexi Churchill, Mike Hixenbaugh, Suzy Khimm
“They used their car to stay warm when a winter storm brought down the Texas power grid. In a state that doesn't require carbon monoxide alarms in homes, they had no warning they were poisoning themselves.”
National Geographic, Alex Temblador
"Beautiful, abundant, and surprisingly hardy, these legendary blooms captivate flower lovers.”
Miami New Times, Joshua Ceballos
“Atlantic Sapphire is a Norwegian industrial fish-farming company with operations in Denmark and [Homestead, Florida] that bills itself as the ‘largest global onshore aquaculture company in the world.’ At its 160-acre facility in Homestead, the company raises about 10,000 tons of salmon per year, with plans to expand over the next ten years to 220,000 tons–a figure that represents more than 40 percent of current U.S. salmon consumption.”
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Ta-dah
We’re skipping the recipe this week so I can show off the first of our spring and summer harvest!
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All done. Thanks for letting me get that out of my system.
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I hope you got enough to eat. There’ll be enough to go around next week and the week after.
—Xander
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