Community-led housing’s biggest obstacle is competing against for-profit developers for land.

Evidence

The greatest challenge for CLH groups, argue Benson and Hamiduddin (2017), is finding land. This is partly because for-profit developers are likely to bid higher, making the process more complicated and financially risky for CLH groups (Scanlon and Fernández- Arrigoitia, 2015). Without support from local authorities or grants, it is difficult for most communities to raise sufficient funds to establish a housing project, even when the land itself is cheap. — Yael Arbell, The Circle of Commoning, 27

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the essay ‘On Sacrifice’ treatment of scarcity and who can marshal resources; also to market-vs-commons dynamics familiar from the reader’s knowledge of degrowth and urban commons literature.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what concrete grant and land-bank mechanisms have enabled CLH to outbid developers in specific UK or European cases?
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — Yael Arbell, The Circle of Commoning:…, 27