All wealth comes from land. All labor happens on land. All life depends on land. Yet in the capitalist system, land is treated as a commodity — something to be bought and sold to the highest bidder, extracted until it’s exhausted, abandoned when it’s no longer profitable.
That is not necessary. Land can be held in trust. Governed collectively. Managed for the benefit of the people who live on it, the generations that will come after, and the non-human life that depends on it.
What enclosure of land actually meant
The enclosure of common lands in England was not about efficiency. It was about control. Converting the peasantry into a landless working class that had to sell their labor to survive. Converting land into a speculation asset, breaking the relationship between people and the territory they depended on.
We are still living in that system. Land that could feed a community is held by investors who have never set foot on it. Housing is speculative. Farming is controlled by corporations. Indigenous territories are stolen systematically. The relationship between people and land — which in traditional commons was about responsibility and long-term stewardship — is replaced by the calculation of maximum extraction and profit.
This is destroying both people and ecosystems. Communities displaced for dams. Forests clearcut for short-term profit. Soil depleted. Water polluted. Species extinct. When land is governed as a commodity, the long-term costs of use are externalized onto future generations, onto ecosystems, onto communities that lack the power to refuse.
The community land trust model
The community land trust is the most developed institutional response to land enclosure in the contemporary United States. The mechanism is specific: the trust acquires land and holds it permanently in common. Housing or agricultural development on that land is sold to individuals or families — but the land beneath it is never sold. It remains in trust, governed by a board that includes residents, community members, and public representatives.
The result: housing affordability is permanently preserved because the land beneath the housing can never be re-enclosed for speculative appreciation. When a resident sells their home, the resale price is limited by formula — they can recoup their investment and a share of appreciation, but not the full speculative gain. The difference between what they could sell for on the open market and what they actually receive stays in the trust, keeping the housing affordable for the next resident.
This is not a subsidy. It is a governance structure that removes land permanently from the commodity market. The trust is governed by the community. The land is managed in the community’s long-term interest. The people who live on it have security of tenure without the speculative extraction that makes housing unaffordable.
Indigenous governance and the long view
The most sophisticated land governance in human history is indigenous. Systems developed over thousands of years for managing specific territories — their soils, their waterways, their forests, their wildlife populations — in ways that sustained both human communities and the broader ecological systems they depended on.
These systems were not primitive. They were highly calibrated to the specific conditions of specific places, encoding accumulated knowledge about what those places needed to remain productive and resilient across generations. The enclosure of indigenous territories didn’t just dispossess people of land. It destroyed governance systems that had solved, in practice, the problem that modern land management is still failing to solve: how do you manage a territory for the long-term benefit of the people and ecosystems that depend on it, rather than for the short-term extraction of whoever holds title?
The Zapatista land reforms in Chiapas, the forest rights movement in India, the Indigenous Protected Areas in Australia — these are not nostalgic returns to a prior state. They are the reconstruction of governance systems appropriate to specific places, by the communities that know those places best.
What changes when land leaves the market
When land is held in commons — whether through community land trusts, indigenous governance, or other collective tenure arrangements — several things change structurally.
Housing affordability becomes a governance question rather than a market outcome. Communities can make binding decisions about what gets built and who it serves. Speculation is structurally impossible: you cannot bet on land values when the land is not for sale.
Stewardship becomes possible. When land cannot be sold, the incentive to extract and move on disappears. The people governing the land are the people who will live with the consequences of how it is governed. Long-term ecological health becomes rational rather than a sacrifice.
Community wealth becomes possible. The surplus generated by land — its increasing productivity, its appreciation in value — stays in the community rather than flowing to landowners who may have no other relationship to it. Community land trusts capture that surplus for the community. Agroecological commons distribute the productivity of the land to the people who work it.
Land is the foundation. When it is enclosed, the people dispossessed from it have no choice but to accept whatever terms the labor market offers. When it is commons, the people who depend on it have the ground to stand on — literally and structurally — from which to build everything else.