Together or Not At All: A Little Guide to Owning Land Collectively by Bex Berryhill
This zine is available to read for free or to purchase in print form.
“This is a guide to owning land collectively. That’s actually too broad: this is a guide to the part at the beginning of owning land collectively where you have to parse through existing legal structures and figure out how, on paper, this is all going to work. It’s a guide meant to shine a beam of light into the daunting cavern of real estate law, to clear some ground to plant a permanent garden where long-term collective power can grow and thrive. There are no delusions of utopian grandeur here; in fact there is a foundational tension underpinning this work. Owning land with other people is one of the most robust ways to ensure long-term housing security, build collective power, and nourish deep relationships with a place. At the same time, the idea of “property” is complicated at best, and land “ownership” is fundamentally a non-liberatory practice. Private property is a morally bankrupt concept built off capitalist and colonialist structures which systematically reroute and consolidate power (stemming from control of land and resources) to the white owning class, via the tools of genocide, slavery, displacement, extractive industries, redlining, and other historical and contemporary practices. The enclosure of true commons—space and resources available to all members of a society—has a long and ugly history. In short, private property is a bad system, and it’s also the context we currently live in and have to navigate.”
About the Author
Bex Berryhill (they/she) lives in a mostly finished cabin at a rural land project on the Olympic Peninsula. They are a co-founder of the Gray Coast Guildhall, a collectively owned and all-volunteer operated performance and organizing space. They engage in various types of projects and pursuits, always towards the goal of building a life worth living, in a web of shared resilience, autonomy, and joy. They can be reached at wildishness@riseup.net