Free the land How we can fight poverty and climate chaos

Review by Booklist Review

In this provocatively titled exploration of land ownership in the U.S., journalist Lim does an excellent job of showing just how complicated the topic of private property can be. Deftly ignoring arguments over socialism versus capitalism, she uses a highly engaging narrative approach to investigate the complex histories and realities behind such topics as rent control, allotments, and inherited property. Lim's enormous interest in better understanding these situations is obvious as she engages with people and places in circumstances that, upon reflection, are likely more common than most readers realize. One example, the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation, is home to an 80-acre plot of land owned by 2,285 people. How this fracturing came to be through the burden of inheritance laws is far more intriguing than one might expect. Inserting her own experiences into the text (a roof leak any renter will identify with), Lim makes the title even more compelling and personal. As she shares interviews with those she meets and considers how various groups and governments, large and small, deal with land, she constantly circles around the questions raised by the commodification of property. With this timely, perceptive, smart, and immensely important inquiry, Lim proves herself to be a writer to watch.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Library Journal Review

Journalist Lim (editor, The World We Need) argues that many issues in the United States--inequality, gentrification, climate change--can be linked to the aim to make landownership profitable. She explores the history of inequitable landownership practices in the country, focusing on farming, urban development, and environmentalism. Her book shows that landownership in the United States is overwhelmingly white and corporate, and people who cannot afford to buy, or are priced out of their neighborhoods as property values rise, are shut out. Lim also looks at alternate models of landownership, such as community land trusts, public lands, and cooperative models, many of which reflect practices from Indigenous peoples and Black communities and are often discounted for racist reasons. She gives examples of these models in practice today and weighs their advantages and disadvantages. Cooperative ownership models, which reflect the interest and desires of the community, are favored by many, although Lim urges that care be taken to avoid replicating inequities. VERDICT A fascinating look at alternative landownership practices. Recommended for readers interested in economics, the environment, and issues of inequality.--Rebekah Kati

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

A journalistic account of the impact of private land ownership on the environment and on people's quality of life. "America is synonymous with private property," writes Lim, a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. And, she states more boldly, "the commodification of land is driving many of America's most intransigent problems." Historically, Native Americans were dispossessed by European settlers and, later, by the federal government, and former enslaved people were promised and then denied land reparations, condemning them to sharecropping servitude. Today, developers purchase land in low-income and working-class neighborhoods and erect luxury buildings, fueling gentrification and its accompanying high rents and shrinking supply of affordable housing. Lim asserts that the public will be served and the environment protected only when land is publicly owned, such that governments are accountable, or placed in community land trusts. She builds her case on evidence from events in the country's history and stories of grassroots organizations such as the Indian Creek Community Forest in Oregon; the Somali Bantu Community Association (concerned with farmland security) in Lewiston, Maine; the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, Massachusetts; and the Northern Farmers of Color Land Trust in Minnesota. Lim's reports from her journalistic travels through the U.S. and Canada are woven with stories of growing up in Calgary, her family history, and her current life in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The accounts she presents, though, belie her claim "that land is rarely talked about as a social or economic issue today." And her assumption that many of America's intransigent problems are attributable to land ownership and to how the country's opportunities and resources are distributed would have been more credible if tempered by discussion of their entanglement in matters of race, class, and political ideology. Lim is a single-minded and enthusiastic advocate for the common and public ownership of land. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---