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The Community Land Trust is a model of collective land tenure that combines individual freedom with collective strength by separating land and home ownership. Originating in the United States in the 1960s within the civil rights movement, the model aims to ensure land tenure security and promote local and community development led by residents themselves. In celebration of Brazil’s National Housing Day and the seven-year anniversary of the Favela Community Land Trust Project* in August, RioOnWatch highlighted this initiative which, alongside local communities, has been changing housing rights paradigms in Brazil’s favelas and peripheral areas.
Although it first emerged in rural areas, the Community Land Trust model found the right conditions to prosper in cities starting in the 1980s. The number of CLTs in the United States quickly rose during the 1990s, followed by the model’s expansion into Europe and the Global South in the early 2000s. Today, there are over 500 CLTs worldwide, across more than ten countries. The model’s success in meeting its goals secured its inclusion in the New Urban Agenda—an international pact signed in 2016 by United Nations member states, aimed at implementing urban policies that guarantee the right to the city for all.
For the first time in history, a group of consolidated urban informal settlements created a CLT in 2004, inaugurating a new paradigm of practice for the model. This took place through the Fideicomiso de la Tierra Caño Martín Peña, created by seven informal settlements along the Martín Peña canal in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The success of this pioneering experience inspired reflection on the model in Brazil, leading to the launch of the Favela CLT Project in 2018, developed through exchanges between technical allies and favela residents from both countries to consider the model’s challenges and possibilities.
Beyond the pioneering spirit of the seven Puerto Rican communities, reflection on CLTs in Brazil was also fueled by the wave of forced evictions between 2010 and 2016 brought on by Rio de Janeiro’s preparations to host the World Cup and Olympics. Numerous favelas were affected, including Vila Autódromo, where residents had held state government-issued land concession titles. The powerlessness to resist public authorities during this period, even despite land rights, underscored the need for new strategies in the fight for permanence and housing in favelas and other urban settlements.
Aligned with the normative understanding already present in favelas—that each resident owns their home and that the community is to be managed collectively, especially given the absence of public investment—the CLT model emerged in Rio’s favelas as a highly promising path. The possibility of formalizing existing social arrangements and pacts, while ensuring residents’ permanence and empowering them—through community organizing—to realize local development led by residents themselves, began to gain ground through the Favela CLT Project.
Starting in November 2018, the Favela CLT Project got off the ground in Brazil, structured around three areas of practical action: community mobilization, dissemination of the model and advocacy. Since then, the Favela CLT Project’s impacts and achievements have included:
- Over 2,600 people reached through project activities, gaining knowledge of the model and its potential;
- Workshops held in seven cities across Brazil’s five regions (São Carlos, São Paulo; Florianópolis and Garopaba, Santa Catarina; Salvador, Bahia; Belém, Pará; Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais; and Brasília), promoting the model nationwide;
- 139 community workshops in 10 favelas in Rio de Janeiro, resulting in two association’s bylaws, the involvement of around 800 residents, and two community plans for local improvements;
- A working group bringing together 361 people from 170 institutions, including the Metropolis Observatory, the Union for Popular Housing and Rio’s Public Defenders’ Land and Housing Nucleus (NUTH), among other leading actors in Brazil’s housing rights movement;
- CLT included in the master plans of five cities (São João de Meriti, Rio de Janeiro, Biguaçu, Maricá and Magé), with efforts underway to add it to the master plans of four other cities (Brasília, São Carlos, Cametá and Garopaba);
- 27 online events on CLT-related topics, with over 1,500 participants from across Brazil and abroad;
- Participation in the 11th World Urban Forum in 2022, in Poland;
- Federal bill (PL 5618/23) approved by the Urban Development Committee of Brazil’s House of Representatives in 2025; and
- A regulatory bill introduced in Rio de Janeiro’s City Council in 2025.
Of the three areas of activity underscored by the Favela CLT Project, it is grassroots mobilization that has so far produced the deepest impacts in partner communities—engaging broad participation, strengthening residents’ organizing and renewing hope in the formalization of existing arrangements and pacts in their communities.
A resident of the Esperança Housing Complex, located in Colônia Juliano Moreira in Jacarepaguá, Rio’s West Zone, Neide Mattos first learned about the Favela CLT Project in 2020. However, even before learning about CLTs, the Esperança Group already applied principles at the core of this collective land management model to their local reality: through self-management and collective actions, residents created a collective and, over the years, built dignified housing for 70 families.
“The CLT offers a solid foundation so that we can be assured of remaining on the land, and so I can pass on to my children [the fruits of] all the sacrifice and effort of long years of meetings… this trophy that is my home… Or, if my children do not want it, may this home go to a family that does not have the means to enter a government program to get one. And may this home be made available to a family who truly needs to have a home to also call a trophy.” — Neide Mattos
Ailton Lopes was born and raised in Trapicheiros, a century-old favela in Tijuca, Rio’s North Zone, that has long fought for land regularization. Since being introduced to the model, Lopes and his community have recognized the CLT as an essential path to guaranteeing land rights for residents of informal settlements.
“The CLT is a protective tool, aimed at shielding the community from evictions processes and real estate speculation. The CLT Project is made up of a group of technical allies, volunteers and community leaders, and it’s been working… We believe this will work very well in Brazil.” — Ailton Lopes
For Antonio Xaolin, a well-known community leader in Rocinha, Brazil’s largest favela, the CLT represents a foundation against forced evictions, a form of violence that has been a constant in the historical development of cities across Brazil.
“CLTs hold great value for favelas and peripheral areas because they combine land tenure, which is collective, with the individual right to housing. For me, the Favela CLT Project is of great importance to favelas.” — Antonio Xaolin
All these achievements have paved the way for the consolidation of a first CLT experience in Brazil. They also demonstrate the model’s potential as an alternative for guaranteeing the right to the city and the basic rights that stem from securing a home. In the coming years, the plan is to engage with even more actors, consolidating partnerships and creating even closer ties with favelas and other partner communities to jointly build a new future through the CLT.
*The Favela Community Land Trust and RioOnWatch are both projects of Rio de Janeiro-based NGO Catalytic Communities (CatComm).
