John Emmeus Davis

John Emmeus Davis (born 1949) is a scholar, writer, teacher and community organizer who has advanced the understanding and development of community land trusts in the United States, Great Britain,^[1] Australia, and Belgium.^[2]

Much of his scholarship and practice has focused on advancing the cause of community land trusts while establishing connections between community land trusts and other forms of shared equity homeownership, a housing sector he was the first to describe in 2006.^[3] In a number of essays and research reports, evaluating the performance of community land trusts and other forms of shared equity homeownership, Davis has highlighted the effectiveness of these alternative models of tenure in preserving affordability in hot real estate markets and in preventing deferred maintenance and mortgage foreclosure in cold markets. “Counter-cyclical stewardship” is the term he coined in 2008 to describe this outcome.^[4][5]

Davis has served for many years as the de facto historian of the community land trust (CLT) movement, documenting precursors and pioneers of a model of housing and community development that is rooted in the Gramdan Movement of India, the Garden Cities of England, and the Civil Rights Movement in the American South. He has recently worked with Open Studio Productions to create a series of video documentaries about CLTs in communities of color, entitled Streets of Dreams, and has joined with a colleague, Greg Rosenberg, in building a web-based digital archive of historical materials named Roots & Branches: A Gardener’s Guide to the Origins and Evolution of the Community Land Trust.

Education

Davis earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 1971, an M.S. in Developmental Sociology from Cornell University in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Community Development Planning, Social & Health Systems Planning and Community and Regional Sociology, Cornell University in 1986.^[6]

Career

Davis began his career as a community organizer and social services administrator in the coalfields of East Tennessee. While still an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, he joined the Student Health Coalition (SHC), supporting the work of doctors, medical students, and nursing students who provided free medical screenings for low-income families in Appalachia. A cadre of community organizers, including Davis, were responsible for doing the groundwork to prepare rural communities for week-long Health Fairs and for creating community health councils that could find their own solutions to problems of poor health, polluted streams, and environmental degradation caused by strip mining. Two outgrowths of SHC’s work were the establishment of a string of community-controlled clinics in East Tennessee and Eastern Kentucky and the creation of Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM), a grassroots organization fighting for environmental justice.

Remaining in East Tennessee after college, Davis was employed for several years by a federally funded child development program, which operated a dozen centers throughout Anderson County. He became the executive director of this program in 1974, leaving in 1976 when he was offered a teaching assistantship at Cornell University in the graduate field of Development Sociology.

After graduate school he joined the staff of the Institute for Community Economics (1981-1985), assisting in the early development of community land trusts in the United States, including the first urban CLT, the Community Land Cooperative of Cincinnati. He subsequently served as the housing director and Enterprise Community coordinator for the City of Burlington, Vermont (1986-1996). As Burlington's housing director under Mayor Bernie Sanders and Mayor Peter Clavelle, Davis played a leading role in crafting and enacting legislation at the municipal, state and federal levels, including Burlington's condominium conversion, inclusionary zoning and housing trust fund ordinances, Vermont's Cooperative Housing Ownership Act, and the definition of "community land trusts" incorporated into Section 213 of the National Housing and Community Development Act of 1992.

Davis was one of the co-founders of Burlington Associates in Community Development, LLC In 1993,^[7] a consulting cooperative that has assisted over 100 community land trusts in the United States and other countries. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy from 2007 to 2009 and has been a Senior Fellow at the National Housing Institute (NHI) since 2010. He is a regular contributor to Shelterforce, NHI’s print publication, and to NHI’s on-line journal, Shelterforce Weekly.

Academics

Davis has taught at Tufts University, the University of Vermont, Southern New Hampshire University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[8] He was a founding member of the faculty and board of the National Community Land Trust Academy (2006-2012), a program of the National Community Land Trust Network (USA), and served for several years as the Academy’s dean.

In September 2012, the National CLT Network established the John Emmeus Davis Award for Scholarship to recognize individuals who have "contributed significant scholarship to advance the field of community land trusts, or who have been inspirational teachers, coaches or mentors." The first recipient of this award was Julie Brunner, who was honored in 2014 for years of teaching and mentorship provided through the CLT Academy, the CLT Network, and the Cornerstone Partnership.

Major Works

• Les Fiducies Foncières Communautaires: Introduction à L'antispéculation Immobilière (Montreal, Quebec: Les Éditions Écosociété, 2014).
• "Shared Equity Homeownership," The Encyclopedia of Housing (Second Edition), Andrew Carswell, ed. (Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications, 2012: 666-670).
• “More Than Money: What Is Shared in Shared Equity Homeownership?” ABA Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law 19 (3&4), 2010.
• The Community Land Trust Reader, Editor (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2010).^[9]
• Lands in Trust, Homes That Last, with Alice Stokes, Burlington, VT: Champlain Housing Trust 2009. http://www.champlainhousingtrust.org/publications/
• The City-CLT Partnership: Municipal Support for Community Land Trusts, with Rick Jacobus, Policy Focus Report, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2008.
• Shared Equity Homeownership: The Changing Landscape of Resale-restricted, Owner-occupied Housing, Montclair, NJ: National Housing Institute, 2006. http://www.nhi.org/research/522/shared_equity_homeownership/
• “Between Devolution and the Deep Blue Sea: What’s a City or State To Do?” In A Right to Housing: Foundation of a New Social Agenda. Editors: Rachel Bratt, Chester Hartman & Michael Stone (Temple University Press, 2006).
• The Affordable City: Toward a Third Sector Housing Policy (Temple University Press, 1994).
• Contested Ground: Collective Action and the Urban Neighborhood (Cornell University Press, 1991).^[10]
• The Community Land Trust Handbook, with multiple authors, The Institute for Community Economics (Rodale Press, 1982).

External links

• CLT Resources, Burlington Associates in Community Development, LLC
• National Community Land Trust Network
• Research Collaborative of the National CLT Network
• Roots & Branches: A Gardener’s Guide to the Origins and Evolution of the Community Land Trust

References