Community land trusts (CLTs) have grown as an alternative model of land use to limit housing speculation and counter displacement of residents. Emerging scholarship argues the capacity of CLTs for more transformative politics and social justice is often undermined by an over-focus on affordable homeownership production (DeFilippis et al., 2019; Lowe, 2025). A better understanding of the transformative potential of CLTs requires attention to local politics, community control, and embeddedness of local solutions in complex power structures. We use Gaventa’s power cube to perform comparative power analysis of four CLTs in Memphis and San Diego and find that CLTs vary in their potential for community control based on origins, funding mechanisms, approach to partnerships, and vision for the future. Our findings suggest the need for further qualitative research to understand the heterogeneity of CLTs in terms of community power, but also more policy support from different levels of government to support community-controlled CLTs. This paper addresses multiple aspects of the conference theme, Community Currents: Navigating Change Together. Historically, individual community wealth building (CWB) models—such as CLTs—emerged as grassrootsresponses to the inability of public policy to address systemic issues in land use and housing. These models continue to be experimented with to overcome historical marginalization and contemporary shifts in urban and rural governance and development. Nonetheless, the origins, mission, and goals of these models vary widely depending on the mix of stakeholders involved, the requirements of funding, and the capacity available. As such, community development knowledge and theories are essential to assess the potential for sustainability in individual iterations of these models.
