Prosper Australia

photo credit: betta design

The $840bn bailout of US banks provides the US Treasury with a unique opportunity. Will the as yet unnamed new Federal agency (which we will call the Bailout Agency), charged with the responsibility for selling off the bad debts of risk-bending bankers, use this money to reduce the chance of future boom-busts to occur?

This could be a reality if the whopping $840bn dollars (more than spent on 5 years of the Iraq war) was used to switch the 3 million odd sub-prime borrowers over to a Community Land Trust model of land ownership. The Trust could become a department of the Bailout Agency.

The new system would see the former sub-prime lenders paying a yearly Site Fee to the Trust based on the earning capacity of that site. This would allow land valuers, those who many argue are the front line to the realistic economy (vis the desk loitering economists and their mathematical models) to adjudge what someone on an average wage in an average location could earn in that locality.
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With the growing pressure to find affordable accommodation and our excitement at the Canberra Land rent proposal, we thought it high time we showed you a growing trend through the northern hemisphere – Community Land Trusts

by Prosper Tasmania’s Leo Foley

(Based on material from the Institute of Community Economics, Massachusetts)

A Community Land Trust (CLT) is a democratically controlled nonprofit organization that owns real estate in order to provide benefits to its local community – and in particular to make land and housing available to residents who cannot otherwise afford them.

CLT’s recognise that land is a finite resource and will naturally appreciate in time due to social progress and population growth. This natural appreciation in land values is recycled back into the Community Land Trust to ensure that future home owners can afford to enter the CLT.
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