[permaculture] personal land rights vs private property

Rain Tenaqiya raincascadia at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 12 12:30:35 EST 2008


As usual, the dialogue has become polarized between extreme opposites, in this case private property versus communal or state property.  What I, and others, are advocating is personal land rights- a guaranteed access to land for a person (or perhaps family, etc) for a defined period of time with specific rights (for example, the right to use or sell whatever you produce from the land).
 
In my case, I do not own actual property.  What I and my partner own is a share in a corporation which owns 800 acres.  Our share gives us the right to lease ten acres in perpetuity, handing it down to someone else, who must be approved by the other shareholders, when we die, or whatever.  On our ten acres, we can pretty much do what we want, with certain restrictions, such as the restriction on cutting down big trees without permission from the group.  We don't even actually own the house we are almost done building, or the gardens we are developing.  But we have the right to add the value of these things to our share, if we wanted to sell it.
 
This is kind of like a community land trust, but we have more equity.  This structure keeps the land in one piece and encourages community decision-making, especially with regard to approval of prospective shareholders.  Our turnover rate has been very slow during our 30 years, though that is probably mostly due to the fact that we all live about a half mile apart and we have to build our own homes since none of us are rich and we can't get loans (since we don't personally own the land).
 
So, here's an example of a structure that gives us personal guaranteed access to land without requiring private property (though it is corporate property, which is technically private).
 
Rain


      


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