A New Durham-Rooted Land, Housing and Environmental Justice Org/Co-Op
Leslie St Dre, Founder, Organizer, Facilitator, Community Land and Power
Community Land and Power (CLP), a new Durham-rooted land, housing and environmental justice organization, is finally taking root with the support of NCEJN as our fiscal sponsor. We couldn’t have found a better home to nest and launch this project. With the acceleration of US fascists and oligarchs stealing land and lives at home and abroad, we have to get creative, hold onto each other, and strategize across issues and differences like never before.
CLP aims to be a hub for such strategizing, for community ecosystem development, and for knowledge sharing. Our mission and work will be to facilitate and steward intersectional organizing, political education, coalition building, leadership development, and policy interventions that catalyze sustainable, community-led stabilization, reclamation, and development without displacement projects. We will start where we live in Durham, NC, though our long-term vision is to build collaborative ecosystems and networks to share strategies and resources across the state in partnership with the NCEJN and other vision aligned orgs.
Bringing together people with lived and learned expertise, we will help build a movement to protect neighborhoods and to redistribute, enable access to, and decommodify land and housing through community land trusts, cultural, environmental or agricultural easements, or land and housing co-operatives. These projects can also be set up as climate resiliency hubs – spaces residents can invest in and turn to in times of escalating climate disasters – as well as hubs supporting and generating local solidarity economies.
Origins
Though the work wasn’t done as “Community Land and Power”, the origin of this project started in 2022 when I organized with my neighbors facing eviction, including Sheba Everett (CLP Advisory Board member) to stop their evictions and win their forever homes. They formed a united front as the Eno River Tenants’ Association and issued a petition to hold the landlord, which happened to be the Eno River Association (ERA), accountable to their performative land acknowledgment and boldly demanded they stop the evictions, make full repairs, and turn over the homes to tenants using the shared equity land trust model. After ERTA also interrupted ERA’s annual meeting, carried out multiple call-in and targeted email campaigns, got multiple articles in the press, including front page news, and the petition reached over 700 signatures (a high number for Durham), ERA agreed to temporarily stop the evictions.
The organizing continued and inspired some of the landlord’s organizational partners to cut ties with them, volunteers left the org, and some funders pulled their money. Subsequently the ERA agreed to cancel 1.5 years of rent, make repairs and turn the homes over to a local housing land trust org at no cost, so that the tenants could be set up as land trust homeowners. Over three years after the start of our struggle, the tenants are becoming land trust homeowners on land that is protected forever along the beloved Eno River.
This was a historic victory in a state that bans tenant protections, and it was won through enduring sweat equity, a united front, and solidarity from across the city. We will use this momentum to grow CLP and to defend, reclaim and steward land, housing and environmental justice projects across Durham and beyond!
Land, Housing and Environmental Justice Platform
CLP is convening a coalition to co-create a visionary platform that bridges siloed organizing across the city and across issues as they intersect with land, housing and environmental justice
With community orgs, tenant unions, and mutual aid groups, as well as legal, policy, and arts practitioners working together, we can advance local solutions like land banking and developing city-owned land as permanently affordable housing, develop shared strategies to tackle state preemption laws that ban tenant protections, and collectively vision for a future where everyone has the truly affordable, dignified housing they need.
The Values guiding our work
We will prioritize the leadership of historically marginalized residents and the needs of those without safe, stable, dignified housing. The values guiding our work are rooted in the principles of interdependence, solidarity economies, and Land Back to Right Relations.
Core Inspirations
Some of our core inspirations are POOR Magazine’s Homefulness Project, Power of the Commons & The Industrial Commons, Center for Ethical Land Transition, Sustainable Economies Law Center, Race and Equity in All Planning Coalition, Cooperation Jackson, and community-led land reclamation and housing justice projects everywhere.
Upcoming projects
Starting this February, CLP will be facilitating public education forums on the Unified Development Ordinance draft (UDO) and working to organize communities across Durham to demand they get a voice in how their communities are developed. We will simultaneously be facilitating processes to create a citywide people’s plan and platform for land, housing and environmental justice as part of our resist and build strategy.
The UDO is effectively the law of the land governing all planning and zoning within the municipality. What the Planning Department has presented as the final draft will incentivize more speculation, private equity land grabs, and it will blanket Durham in more unaffordable housing. Despite affordable housing being Durham residents’ number one demand for multiple years, Planning is only planning for profit. The UDO is anything but unified, unless we are talking about the unity of market-rate developers, developer backed electeds, and other real estate tycoons. Unaffordable upzoning, allowing developers to build more units than current zoning allows with no mandated affordability, is proven to inflate land values and increase speculation causing more Black and Brown displacement. These legislative initiatives would also give away opportunities to recapture value for public benefits at a time when Durham is oversaturated in vacant unaffordable homes and inequality is worsening.
The impacts of these private giveaways would be irreversible under a state law which bans downzoning, meaning we wouldn’t have a local method to curb the gentrification and price hikes accompanying for-profit development plans, nor the ability to stop the environmental degradation that will follow. There is still time to hit the brakes, to maintain democratic processes on how Durham is shaped, and to stop private equity from buying up our city, but not long.
Home prices, rents, homelessness, and racialized displacement are rising in Durham, and NC is one of the many states that bans rent control and many other tenant protections. Now some local and state representatives are working to end most public hearings on unaffordable development and give away our only leverage to demand developers include affordable housing. Unaffordable upzoning (allowing developers to build more units than current zoning allows) is proven to inflate land values and increase speculation causing more Black and Brown displacement.
The plan is to organize communities and organizations to demand environmental and displacement impact reports that we can then assess together in order to make firmer demands for community-led stabilization and development without displacement. Every time the city gives handouts to for-profit developers, land values rise making it harder for cities to ever acquire land at affordable rates to then be able to develop affordable housing. There are few local public education opportunities around the issues, despite the impacts of planning and zoning on all of our lives. CLP is excited to start facilitating them!
Additional Collaboration with NCEJN
There are many other projects and campaigns that CLP is excited to strategize around with NCEJN and all of you in its thriving network, such as the impact of Big Tech, AI and data centers on land, housing, water, the environment, and our overall lives and futures. We are excited to be a part of the NC Data Center Network and to continue to collaborate on protecting our land, water and people from the impact of this massive Big Tech takeover that is a threat to every aspect of our lives.
To stay updated on our events and work or to connect, please reach out here!
