On the history of community-led land trusts with Chiyi Tam

THE GREEN LINE'S
CHANGEMAKER INTERVIEW

ON THE HISTORY OF COMMUNITY-LED  LAND TRUSTS with Chiyi Tam

For one of our Changemakers newsletters, we spoke with urban planner and anti-displacement organizer Chiyi Tam about the history of community organizing in Chinatown.

Photographed by: MATTHEW KARIATSUMARI

A PORTRAIT OF CHIYI TAM.
📸: MATTHEW KARIATSUMARI

Adele Lukusa BW

Adele Lukusa

A graduate of TMU, Kitchener native enamoured with Toronto and lover of Jamila Woods. Currently working on supporting mutual aid efforts and unpacking the nuances of Black haircare.

Nov. 1, 2023

When I first get on the phone with urban planner and anti-displacement organizer Chiyi Tam, her excitement is palpable — contagious even.

Fresh off a summit with the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts (CNCLT), she makes it so easy to understand the complex, but worthy task of organizing land trusts, which is when a collective comes together to own private property as a non-profit charity (often to preserve history-rich areas.) If Chiyi’s name is familiar, she’s one of the brains behind Toronto's Chinatown Land Trust.

Community land trusts have their origins in Georgia’s African-American communities, and have now spread across our city, from Parkdale to Kensington Market to Chinatown. Just like her dad did in Hong Kong, Chiyi is using her planning skills to ensure Chinatown is managed by its residents, business owners and their descendants.

You’ve spoken on your blog about how you got into urban planning, but I learned that your father has also been in the planning field. Though it might not have crossed your mind the first go-around, looking back, how has that impacted you?

I think he still feels surprised that I ended up being a planner. Like,  I almost forgot that that's what my parents did.

My father is a planner in a very different planning system — in a deeply traditional system. He was trained in Canada and then decided to go back to Hong Kong because he wanted to see…what it looked like to go from one colonial power to a completely different state power. He just wanted to see the paperwork behind it. He was like, “This is like a once in a generation thing, and I'm curious.” And he's always been an organizer, very interested in politics and very vocal about us being active and engaged in hearing about community power and the future of community.

I think there's a way that my father speaks about colonial property systems that is complicated but not complex, you know? Like it's a solvable problem. It's not just some mysterious nebulous thing. He makes it feel more real and tangible and practical even. He makes it feel like it's something that's doable — that it's very complicated, but we could do it

I find that really helpful because all of my work is about land ownership now and doing it as a community and being really thoughtful about Indigenous land rights.

What have you learned about organizing from the first CNCLT summit?

I was reminded just how recent this idea of making private property here has existed. And it just doesn't need to be the way that things exist as the status quo in Canada. The Indigenous land trusts are like, “If we buy properties piece by piece and they are Indigenous-led and -owned, then that is Land Back.” That's effectively getting the land back under Indigenous stewardship and decision-making, and they’ll share that decision-making if you are willing to be Indigenous-led.

Also, the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust could’ve incorporated with CNCLT earlier, but the one thing that we got really hung up on was…the idea that the end of all of our activism was just going to end with this boring result, which is that we become our own landlords. It's very radical obviously, compared to how mainstream landlords work, but like, great. So now we've created our own little utopia, our own little co-op, and then what? We wanted to make the overall system better, right? So it was really cool to be able to build relationships with the Indigenous land trust projects because then we could do things like pay rent to their projects and make sure that our budget fuelled their budget, and let them keep on getting more properties. We could collaborate in all of these very real cash-back kind of ways. It was so exciting!

What keeps you motivated and hopeful as you work with the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust?

Sometimes when people recognize you for your projects, they're like, "Oh, look at this cool organization! The Toronto Chinatown Land Trust is doing these cool things." We haven't done anything yet! We don't own a property yet. We've just been having really thoughtful meetings and publishing research and organizing work and talking and relationship-building with people. Because we just incorporated, and that's how it should be. But sometimes, it feels really tiring because you keep on going to these events or conferences or trying to talk to mainstream people that you're not organizing with to explain what you're doing and it really weighs on you. Because you keep on hearing like, "Oh my God! That's so unprecedented," "Oh my gosh! You guys are really innovative," "Oh my gosh! You guys are leading us into something we've never seen before” — and it's just not true. Like, the first land trust in Georgia is celebrating their 55th anniversary in January [2024.]

We discovered that in Chinatown, there are these groups that have never called themselves community land trusts, but basically are. So, they called themselves plan associations or family associations. And back in the day, when the earliest Chinese labourers didn't have any civil rights in Canada, they weren't allowed to own property and they weren't allowed to vote. So what they did is a whole bunch of these guys — a complete bachelor society — all of the people who had the last name Wong, who weren't actually related to each other, just decided to pretend to be family. They were like, “Okay. You're my chosen family.”

We have those stories to lean on because they help us know that we're just continuing a legacy. It's way more reassuring and relieving to know that you're not reinventing the wheel — actually, there have been people who have been taking care of this place for a long time.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

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Toronto Chinatown land trust

Canadian Network of Community Land trusts

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