John Emmeus Davis

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

His professional practice has focused on assisting new community land trusts (CLTs),supporting the growth of older CLTs, and helping municipal agencies, Habitat for Humanity affiliates, and other nonprofit organizations to add permanently affordable housing to their program mix. His early scholarship explored the causes of collective action in urban neighborhoods and promoted “third sector housing,” arguing that various models of private, nonmarket housing do a superior job of delivering affordable housing to lower-income households. He later focused his attention on models of resale-restricted, owner-occupied housing like CLTs, limited equity cooperatives, and homes with long-lasting affordability covenants, a sector to which he gave the name “shared equity homeownership" in 2006.Evaluating the performance of these models in a number of publications, Davis highlighted the effectiveness of shared equity homeownership 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 these favorable outcomes.

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-led development on community-owned land that is rooted in the Gramdan Movement of India, the Garden Cities of England, and the Civil Rights Movement in the American South. In 2014, he and a colleague, Greg Rosenberg, established an online archive of historical materials named Roots & Branches: A Gardener’s Guide to the Origins and Evolution of the Community Land Trust.

In recent years, Davis has worked with Open Studio Productions to create a series of video documentaries about CLTs in communities of color.He served as a technical consultant for Streets of Dreams: Development Without Displacement in Communities of Color (2013) and as a co-producer for Arc of Justice: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of a Beloved Community (2016).

Since 2017, he has served as co-director of the Center for Community Land Trust Innovation. The Center is an international platform for documenting current CLT practices and for exploring novel variations and applications of the CLT model. Its imprint, Terra Nostra Press, is a publisher of books and monographs on various topics related to community ownership or community control of land for purposes of promoting affordable housing, urban agriculture, neighborhood revitalization, and development without displacement.  

Davis earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 1971, and an M.S. in Developmental Sociology from Cornell University in 1981.He earned a Ph.D. in Community Development Planning and Community and Regional Sociology from Cornell University in 1986.

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(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, 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 day care 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).He co-authored the Community Land Trust Handbook (Rodale Press, 1982) and assisted with the early development of community land trusts in the United States, including the first urban CLT, the Community Land Cooperative of Cincinnati.During the decades that followed, Davis continued to champion community land trusts in his writing and professional practice. For his contributions to advancing the cause of CLTs, he received the Swann-Matthei Award from the National CLT Network in 2006.

Davis served as the housing director and Enterprise Community coordinator for the City of Burlington, Vermont from 1986 to 1996. Under Mayor Bernie Sanders and Mayor Peter Clavelle, Davis played a leading role in crafting and enacting affordable housing legislation at the municipal, state and federal levels, including Burlington's condominium conversion ordinance, inclusionary zoning ordinance, and housing trust fund ordinances, Vermont's Cooperative Housing Ownership Act, and the definition of "community land trusts" that was incorporated into Section 213 of the National Housing and Community Development Act of 1992.

Davis was a co-founder of Burlington Associates in Community Development, LLC In 1993, a national consulting cooperative that has provided assistance to a dozen cities and over 100 community land trusts in the United States and other countries. Davis has also worked closely with Habitat for Humanity, helping a number of affiliates to adopt forms of housing that remain permanently affordable. Habitat for Humanity International commissioned him to prepare its 2017 Shelter Report, a publication entitled Affordable for Good: Building Inclusive Communities through Homes that Last.

Davis 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 since 2010.He joined Greg Rosenberg in founding the Center for Community Land Trust Innovation in 2017 and in establishing the Center’s publishing division, Terra Nostra Press, in 2019.

Davis has taught at Tufts University, the University of Vermont, Southern New Hampshire University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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 renamed Grounded Solutions Network after merging with the Cornerstone Partnership in 2016).He served for five years as the Academy’s dean.

In September 2012, the National CLT Network established the John Emmeus Davis Award for Scholarship.This awards recognizes 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 her years of teaching and mentorship through the CLT Academy, the CLT Network, and the Cornerstone Partnership.In 2017, the award was bestowed upon Stephen Hill, an English city planner who has championed CLTs in the United Kingdom in his writing, teaching, and professional practice.

• On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust (Madison, WI: Terra Nostra Press, 2020.
• Affordable for Good: Building Inclusive Communities through Homes that Last (Atlanta, Georgia: Habitat for Humanity international, 2017).
• “Common Ground: Community-Owned Land as a Platform for Equitable and Sustainable Development,” University of San Francisco Law Review 51 (1), 2017.
• Manuel d’antispeculation 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).
• Lands in Trust, Homes That Last, with Alice Stokes, Burlington, VT: Champlain Housing Trust 2009.https://web.archive.org/web/20121016115718/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).
• The Community Land Trust Handbook, with multiple authors, The Institute for Community Economics (Rodale Press, 1982).