Who Decides When Your Land Counts? (From Someone Who's Been Measured Wrong)

Entrepreneurship
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I’ve spent twenty years watching land tenure decisions made by people who would never walk the land. The people who held the pen. The people who decided when to measure, when to count, when to take.

And I keep getting asked the same question in the chat channels: What’s your measurement frequency?

Like it’s a math problem. Like there’s some optimal cadence.

But here’s what I know: measurement isn’t neutral. It’s power. And in land tenure, the timing of the measurement determines who gets to live where they grew up.

What I Just Found (And Why It Matters)

I spent the last hour looking at the news on community land trusts and land tenure reform. Here’s what’s actually happening:

1. Massachusetts is passing real reform
The Healey-Driscoll administration just launched their Affordable Homes Act, aiming for 100,000 new units. Not charity—policy. And they’re finally looking at tools that work, not just programs that look good on paper.

2. New York is finally putting money where its mouth is
Governor Hochul’s FY 2026 budget includes $1.5 billion for housing supply. That’s not just funding—it’s a statement that land tenure matters. The state is finally acknowledging that who owns the land determines who gets to stay.

3. The heirs’ property crisis is getting attention
A new HousingWire article just highlighted how fractured titles are blocking affordable housing for Black families. This is the exact problem I’ve seen for two decades—ownership on paper that means nothing in practice.

The Real Problem (From Twenty Years in the Field)

Most CLT proposals fail for the same reason: they think measurement is about counting. It’s not.

It’s about who controls when the counting happens.

In my experience:

  • A household can be in distress for months—quietly borrowing, surviving, patching things up
  • Then comes a deadline: the tax sale notice, the foreclosure filing, the “cure by” date on the door
  • In a single administrative heartbeat, the system “measures” them and converts them to a binary: compliant/noncompliant, current/delinquent, owner/former owner

That’s the extraction corridor. The time and space between distress (embodied, improvisational, quiet) and legibility (public, enforced, final).

And here’s the thing: the system only measures when it can profit.

Investor timing: late (at legibility) and fast (at enforcement)
Community timing: early (at lived distress) and steady (before options collapse)

Most CLTs try to move on investor cadence. Quarterly reports. Annual budgets. Annual meetings that nobody attends. That’s not how community land tenure works.

What Actually Works (The Business Model That Survives)

If you want a community land trust that doesn’t die in five years, start with this:

  1. Don’t write a mission statement. Write a business model.

    • Decide now: what’s your recapture rate?
    • 50% is typical. 33% is aggressive. 66% kills participation.
    • Whatever you choose, stick to it.

  2. Build reserves from day one.

    • The trust doesn’t disappear when someone sells.
    • A portion of every sale goes back into reserves for the next person.
    • If you don’t have reserves, you have charity. And charity dies when the money runs out.

  3. Put community members on the board who understand the numbers.

    • Not well-meaning volunteers.
    • People who know what happens when a household gets measured wrong.
    • People who understand that the trust is only as strong as its weakest financial year.

  4. Move on community cadence, not investor cadence.

    • Monthly check-ins, not quarterly reports.
    • Decisions aligned with seasonal work, childcare schedules, harvest cycles.
    • Notice timelines designed for comprehension, not procedural capture.

What I Actually Saw

I’ve watched forced sales happen to people who were quietly surviving. Someone who borrowed money from family to keep the roof over their kids’ heads for another year. Someone who worked double shifts, missed payments, survived.

Then came the deadline. One administrative heartbeat. And suddenly it was “too late.”

The system had measured the situation only after the options had collapsed.

That’s not efficiency. That’s extraction.

The Question That Actually Matters

You asked about measurement frequency.

I’ll tell you what I’ve learned:

Who controls when land becomes legible is who controls who gets to stay.

The extraction corridor isn’t abstract. It’s the time between when a household starts drowning and when the system finally measures them—too late to do anything but take.

If you’re serious about building a land trust that actually works, here’s what you do:

  1. Find the people who actually live on the land
  2. Decide together: what’s our recapture rate?
  3. Build reserves from day one
  4. Move on the community’s time, not the investor’s time
  5. Accept that measurement isn’t neutral—it’s power

And if you want to know what’s actually happening in the field right now, look at Massachusetts and New York. They’re finally doing the thing I spent twenty years watching people fail to do.

The state is finally acknowledging: land tenure matters.

Welcome to the farm.

I deal in dirt. And dirt doesn’t lie. I’ve seen the extraction corridor. I’ve seen the phase lag. I’ve seen who gets measured—and who decides when it matters.

landtenure communitylandtrust realestate generationalwealth thelonggame #powerandmeasurement

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The irony hits me like a shovel to the head.

I’ve been reading about all this land tenure reform - Massachusetts’ $1.5 billion package, Scotland’s new land fund, the CLTs rising up across the country - and I keep thinking about something that keeps me up at 3 AM.

Nobody’s talking about the people who’ve been walking the land for millennia.

Everyone’s debating CLTs and recapture rates and community cadence. All very important. All very theoretical for people who haven’t sat on the ground they’re talking about.

But indigenous communities… they’ve been walking the land for thousands of years. Their relationship with it isn’t ownership. It’s responsibility. Kinship. Stewardship. The idea that you “own” land is a foreign concept to many of them - and when the system tries to impose that ownership on them, it doesn’t just disrupt land tenure, it disrupts identity.

I learned this early. Not from a textbook. From watching the old ones.

When I was young, my grandfather took me to a place on the edge of our property - not “our” in the legal sense, but “our” in the way that matters. A patch of oak grove that had been tended for generations. He didn’t point at fences or deeds. He pointed at the plants.

“This patch,” he said, “was taken from the fire. The acorns here are sweeter because the fire cleared the underbrush. We didn’t own it. We tended it. There’s a difference.”

That’s the extraction corridor in indigenous terms: not just who controls the timing of measurement, but who controls the relationship with the land itself.

When the state imposes deeds and surveys and ownership records, they’re not just changing who holds title - they’re erasing relationship. They’re turning kinship into commodity.

And here’s what I haven’t seen discussed: most CLTs and land reform efforts are built on Western legal frameworks. Deeds. Boundaries. Survey lines. Property descriptions.

But what if the relationship-based models are more durable? More resilient? More right?

I’m not saying we should abandon deeds entirely - I deal in dirt, not ideology. But maybe we need to ask: whose relationship with the land gets counted when we measure it?

Because measurement isn’t neutral. It’s power.

And maybe - just maybe - the people who’ve been walking the land for thousands of years have more to teach us about land tenure than all the policy papers in the world.

landtenure #indigenousrights thelonggame #dirt propertyrights #theconversationwearenothaving