The community land trust and smart growth movements are both working to reshape communities. While their approaches, constituencies, and even primary goals are somewhat different, the two movements have a great deal to offer each other. Smart growth provides the CLT movement with a plausible alternative to the status quo in which economic segregation is the norm. Community land trusts provide the smart growth movement with a critical tool for creating stable, mixed-income communities. Unfortunately, in most places there has been too little dialogue and even less collaboration between the two efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for understanding the ways in which proponents of community land trusts and proponents of smart growth can work together to the achieve goals they hold in common.