SBCLT’s mission is to create community led development without displacement and a just transition to Zero Waste in Baltimore. We developed out of a decade of grassroots and youth led organizing to understand and resist a development process that routinely sacrificed our fundamental needs for a healthy environment, quality housing and a dignified role in decision making. SBCLT emerged as a community response to a central question: how do we begin to realize the vision for what we want as we continue to oppose the development that threatens our health and environment? A core group of residents took up this question and committed themselves to find an answer aligned with the core values and principles of human dignity, environmental stewardship, democractic governance, justice and equity. The community land trust model emerged as the form that would allow us to perform the function to meet the needs of the residents of a community burdened by unsafe, unaffordable housing and toxic environmental hazards.
