Savory Sonoma by Stephanie Hiller - July 2018
Nowadays we tend to think wars have been fought primarily over beliefs, but maybe beliefs were just a cover-up for the deeper drive of church and state to conquer and acquire land.
Ah the land. How we adore you. For land is wealth, and wealth is power, and “it’s still the same old story/A fight for blood and glory/ A case of do or die.”
The Native peoples did not own land. Why should they? There was plenty of land, and until the advent of agriculture, tribes wandered with the harvest. Who needs leases?
But then the Westerners arrived, and they carried a piece of paper that was to change the map of the world. It was called the Doctrine of Discovery, and it stated, among other things, that Christians had the right, indeed the God-given mandate, to take the lands in the name of the Church and “make the people subservient.” The people were strange, anyway, to Christian eyes, performing their war dances half-naked with feathers in their hair, whooping and chanting; they needed to be converted to the ways of the more advanced white culture. So it was, and we have all borne the consequences.
Now the supply of good land is getting tight. Right here at home, in prosperous Sonoma County, thousands of people are unable to find land or houses they can afford, to say nothing of land to farm.
In the 1960s, an idealistic young man named Robert Swann in the civil rights movement back East became aware that black farmers in the South were being driven off the land when they joined the NAACP and registered to vote.
Working with Slater King (MLK’s brother), Charles Sherrod, and Faye Bennett they chose a model they discovered in Israel and managed to establish an all-black farming community in Georgia called New Communities.
This model, which they called the Community Land Trust, is a nonprofit entity that holds the land in permanent trust, leasing out spaces for houses, small businesses and farms. The houses and any other improvements on the individual’s land belong to him, are inheritable, and can be sold for its fair valuation; but the land can never be sold. Trusts are thus a hedge against inflated land prices.
The concept caught on. There are now more than 250 CLT communities in the US. Equity Trust, sprung out of this movement and guided by John Emmeus Davis, has the mission of “Changing the way we think about and hold property.” New York City is building CLTs with funding from Citibank!
Wouldn’t it be nice to put that concept into application at SDC? And it could happen, but the obstacles are significant. As I wrote in May, the obvious challenge is money. Since then I’ve learned more about raising money; and it can be done.
A much bigger question is whether the community can come together in sufficient numbers and put in the hours of work to create a design plan that the County can support, and the State approve.
It’s going to test the limits of our spiritual practice, the generosity of our enlighted consciousness, and indeed everything we have learned and espoused about the sacredness of the land and our interconnectedness with each other, to make this dream come true.
It’s not the State, nor even the developers waiting in the wings, that are the greatest obstacle to progress. It’s ourselves.
As you may have noticed during the many battles over EIRs all over the county, when it comes to land use, people revert to a kind of colonial mentality of mine, yours, and the other guys, and our divine right to keep growth at bay. We attach our identities to the land, and pretty soon people get in fights and the community is divided. Then the big developers move in and the party’s over.
Until that happens, we have an unprecedented opportunity. The State has urged us to come up with a plan. The Presidio Trust in San Francisco has set a precedent. After 8 years, it’s financially self-sufficient!
The government just doesn’t want to be responsible for the place anymore. It will cover the costs of “warm closure”—a million a month—for one year while we try to come up with a convincing plan.
Said Daniel Kim, the head of State’s Department of General Services: “We’ve never done it this way before.”
They’ve thrown down the gauntlet. Can we come together and do something gorgeous at Eldridge? Something for the community, not for distant corporate oligarchs? Or do we prefer to sit back in our chairs and complain later?
Contact me if you want to help!
