Sustainable Economies Law Center

Resources to Rethink Home

We develop resources to make it easier to envision how to build a world where every person has a home.

Legal Resource Library

We conduct legal research on land and housing issues and publish easy-to-read legal information on our online legal resource library - CommunityHousingLaw.org. This website is still a work in progress, so stay tuned for more information on starting housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and other forms of shared, cooperative, and equitable housing!

Supporting Permanently Affordable Housing

In this video, the Northern California Land Trust, Oakland Community Land Trust, and the Law Center cover the legal nuts and bolts of permanently affordable/shared equity housing, including different legal models and funding mechanisms to remove housing from the speculative market.

We're also incubating the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, a new model of collective land ownership that mobilizes community capital to preserve affordable and democratically controlled housing and commercial spaces. Check out our template bylaws and articles of incorporation for EB PREC, or visit EB PREC’s website for more information.

Aging Cooperatively

We believe that elders deserve to live with housing security in a community of their choosing and retain self-determination for as long as possible. That's why we brought on a Borchard Fellow for Law & Aging, Julie Gilgoff, to help realize this vision. To find out more, please visit our Aging Cooperatively webpage.

Legal Case Studies

The Law Center is creating detailed legal case studies of communities and housing solutions that emphasize sharing, affordability, and sustainability. This work looks particularly at models of shared housing, including cohousing communities, ecovillages, and housing cooperatives. The legal case studies are designed to allow other groups to replicate existing housing models. Click here for one legal case study by the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

Legal Services

Our Center provides one-time legal advice for sustainable housing projects at our Resilient Communities Legal Cafe. Occasionally, we develop longer-term relationships with clients to create particularly unique and replicable housing models, though our capacity to do this is quite limited.