Land Justice—and Why It Matters

Editors’ Note: This article was originally written for the Summer 2025 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine, “Land Justice: From Private Ownership to Community Stewardship.”

I see a lot of organizations that…are seeing land [ownership] as key. We need a place to stay, to stand on. We need a place to build our analysis, to learn, to exchange….From that ownership grows power.

Emily Kawano, October 2023

In an economy that is increasingly dominated by computing power and technology, what role does land justice play in achieving economic justice?

These days, land justice and the distribution of land ownership may seem, even if still important, perhaps a somewhat secondary or old-fashioned concern. Yet land ownership remains at the core of the distribution of wealth and power in society today.

Power, as A-dae Romero-Briones (Cochiti/Kiowa), vice president of research and policy at First Nations Development Institute, reminded me, is “intricately tied with land and land access.”

Where Land Ownership Matters

Even for the titans of high-tech industry, land ownership remains foundational to consolidating wealth and power. For example, Amazon, as of 2019, reportedly held property valued at $39.2 billion. The firm’s land holdings have only grown exponentially since. As Supply Chain Brain reported, “Between 2020 and 2022, Amazon tripled the amount of built industrial space it owns in North America, according to company filings.”

Achieving land justice remains a central part of advancing economic justice.

Beyond land’s importance for building political and economic power in industry, it so happens that tech titans also like to acquire land for themselves. For example, as of 2022, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos reportedly owned 420,000 acres of US farmland, and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, 270,000 acres.

Land justice matters too for people who are not among the rich and famous. It matters especially for the tens of millions of Americans who are seeking either to own their own homes or to be able to afford rent in cities and suburbs across the country.

It also matters for communities seeking reparations—especially the Indigenous Land Back movement. And it matters for nonprofits and movement organizations that are seeking to acquire assets and build both stability and power.

In short, achieving land justice remains a central part of advancing economic justice.

A Movement for Social Housing

The conversation in movement spaces around the importance of community ownership of land is occurring in multiple areas. One of those areas, logically, centers on housing. Community and public ownership of housing is a growing demand; this trend, and the growth of housing justice movements, should be no surprise. It is in fact a response to the rising cost of housing—whether owned or rented—across the country.

A 2024 report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University found that “[n]ationwide, home prices have jumped a shocking…115 percent since 2010.” (By contrast, inflation since 2010 has been 47 percent). In the first quarter of 2024, a family needed $120,000 to afford a median-priced home, up from $82,000 in 2021. The study indicated that numbers of both cost-burdened renters (those spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing) and extremely cost-burdened renters (people spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing) were at record levels. In 2022, 12.1 million families nationwide spent more than one dollar of every two they earned for housing.

These economic forces are generating a housing justice movement response. Five years ago, the use of the phrase “social housing” in the United States was rare. Today, driven by rising costs, the growing presence of private equity in residential homeownership, and the growth of tenant unions and national tenant organizing, the phrase “social housing” has become increasingly common—and is even beginning to be used as a tool of government policy, especially at the municipal level.

Faced with growing housing unaffordability, the call for public and community ownership has emerged as a central element in the growing movement for social housing. As urban sociologists H. Jacob Carlson and Gianpaolo Baiocchi explained, social housing aims “to employ a systemic approach to providing homes that treat housing not as a commodity, but as a human right.”

This means taking land out of the market. Social housing, through local initiatives to help fund it, is being approved at the ballot box, including in Los Angeles in November 2022 and Seattle in early 2025.

Community Ownership of Commercial Land

While community ownership of commercial real estate is more nascent, it is emerging as an important strategy for communities to address an underappreciated aspect of gentrification—namely, the displacement not just of residents, but of community-based businesses. Businesses typically lease space rather than own the stores where they operate, which makes them particularly vulnerable to displacement.

Nonetheless, community-based efforts are emerging. One of the more developed efforts is in Los Angeles, CA, but examples can be found in many other US cities, including Denver, CO; Portland, OR; Anchorage, AK; Burlington, VT; and the Twin Cities in Minnesota. And one can find additional community-based commercial real estate development efforts underway in Chicago; North Carolina; Kansas City, MO; and Philadelphia, PA.

In 2023, Rudy Espinoza wrote for NPQ about how the nonprofit he directs (Inclusive Action for the City) partnered with two other LA-based nonprofits and a larger community development financial institution (CDFI)—to raise a $10 million property acquisition fund, which financed the purchase of five commercial buildings that house 21 businesses and nonprofits in the predominantly Latine neighborhood of East Los Angeles.

The conversion of land into “real estate” is so ubiquitous in contemporary US society, it is hard to imagine land being considered anything other than property.

As Espinoza explained in his article, this nonprofit strategy, “mission-driven land acquisition [gives local small businesses] much more power to stave off gentrification and stay in their community.” (emphasis in original) At present, Inclusive Action and its nonprofit consortium partners own the buildings; the long-term vision, however, is to enable the business tenants to ultimately acquire ownership stakes in the building directly.

Land as Reparations

The community housing and commercial development efforts described above are inspirational. But there is a tension inherent in much of land justice work. Even when a community nonprofit creates a community land trust to acquire land for community use and to take that land off the market, it is still operating in the framework of treating land as a commodity known as “property.”

The conversion of land into “real estate” is so ubiquitous in contemporary US society, it is hard to imagine land being considered anything other than property. As Romero-Briones noted a few years ago, “Lands only became ‘available’ when they were no longer occupied by the Indigenous people.” The key concept is stewardship, or care. The work ahead, for Romero-Briones, is to “restore the balance of relationship between people and land, environment and production, history and future.”

Or, as Ruth Miller, Meda Dewitt (Lingit), and Margi Dashevsky wrote, shift the conversation from the Western concept of thinking of land and water as “resources” to instead speak of “relatives.”

What does land reparations in Native communities require? As Nikki Pieratos (Chippewa) and Krystal Two Bulls (Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne) explained:

There is not a one-size-fits-all strategy for reparations for Native Nations or Indigenous peoples. Reparations can take the form of national park lands being returned to Native Nation governments, obtaining FPIC [free, prior, and informed consent] in economic development projects, land trusts to return lands to tribes and in some cases individuals, direct grantmaking to Indigenous communities and organizations, investing in physical infrastructure on Tribal lands, and more.

Land back, in short, is not just about returning land—although that is certainly an important aspect of it—it is about restoring right relationship to the land.

A few years ago, Kawano and I wrote, “It is common to think of ownership as being about possession: it’s yours, or it’s mine—or perhaps, if we are thinking as a group, it’s ours. But it is much more than that. Ownership is a bundle of rights—social, individual, and collective—which means its boundaries and intersections vary from place to place.”

The same theme applies to land ownership.

It should be noted that while Native Americans have suffered most directly from land theft—professor of American history Claudio Saunt pointed out that “between 1776 and the present, the United States seized some 1.5 billion acres from North America’s native peoples.” African Americans have also suffered heavily from land theft during the Jim Crow era, with many gains made during the post-emancipation period wiped out in the 20th century.

As Melanie Allen and Jaime Gloshay (Navajo, White Mountain Apache, and Kiowa) stated in NPQ, “Following the end of slavery, Black Southerners began acquiring land, but most of this progress was later reversed.” As of 1910, 14 percent of farm owners in the United States were African American. But as Allen and Gloshay pointed out, “Between 1910 and the late 1990s, close to 90 percent of Black farmland was lost through a range of mechanisms, including lynchings and legal chicanery.” As a result, as Dãnia Davy reported, 15 million acres of Black-owned land in the South were whittled down to a little more than 2 million acres.

Trevor Smith and Savannah Romero (Eastern Shoshone) contended that for reparations to succeed, it is important to create a “braided” narrative that cultivates a “shared vision of freedom that breaks silos, addresses historical erasure, and imagines what collective liberation looks like.”

Putting It All Together

In the exploration of land and housing justice in this series, the focus is on three central themes. One is the intersection of land and power. On this theme we feature two articles—one centered on Native land justice and one on the use of a community stewardship trust in Atlanta to support community ownership of commercial property. Related to this are two interviews—one on Black land ownership preservation and another that looks at how nonprofit leaders can use real estate ownership to build community power (while avoiding common real estate pitfalls).

A second theme is housing justice. This includes an in-depth analysis of how private equity distorts housing—and how nonprofits and movement activists can effectively respond and preserve housing affordability, a local community story of resisting gentrification and supporting community stewardship of land in Seattle, and an article that looks at the broader national struggle for social housing.

The final theme is the role of leadership in building a long-term vision for land justice. On this theme are stories about a coalition that built community land trust housing into a major element of New York City social housing policy; a set of responses from nonprofit and movement leaders to how they define “land justice”; and an article that articulates a vision for land and liberation that links land justice to the broader movement for a solidarity economy.

At the core of these stories is the recognition that building economic justice requires a major shift in society’s relationship to land. In a world faced with growing inequality and an accelerating climate crisis, the extractive mindset that has dominated much of recent land policy in the United States must change.

But there is good news too. While planetary resources are not limitless, the planet is abundant. And by developing community-based and community-owned forms of social housing, it is possible for everyone’s housing needs to be met; achieving broader goals of land and resource justice will require a similar mindset of generosity.

Getting there won’t be easy. National housing advocate Kevin Simowitz observed that achieving a just outcome requires contesting for control with organized capital. Tram Hoang, a California-based housing advocate, noted that “the work goes far beyond policy development.”

Needless to say, the short-term picture, particularly the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and elsewhere, would seem to augur against optimism. Nonetheless, the growing understanding of the need for deep change—in nonprofits and movements more broadly—may offer an important silver lining.

Last year, in an NPQ interview about landback organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area, Corinna Gould (Ohlone) remained optimistic: “There’s a time when things change in the world,” Gould observed. “There is consciousness that is built. And it kind of takes off from there.”