Land, Trusts & Tenancyan overview on the law surrounding land, trusts and tenancies

Of the two types of land trusts most commonly in use, the ownership type is the most common, but the conservancy type is the one which is most commonly recognized by people of the general public. There are several well-known land trusts in operation today including the world land trust, the nature conservancy and the Wildlife preservation Canada trust. The aim of land trusts of this mature is to provide a stewardship over the lands which are entrusted to them. Their primary goal is to ensure that the lands are protected against unregulated and non-beneficial development, to protect and appropriately administer the natural resources and mineral holdings of the land and to provide for the land to be enjoyed by the general public as recreational, educational, or environmental offset space.

One of the most practical uses of a conservationary land trust is to protect water resources, ranchland, farm land and cultural or national historically significant sites from being exploited, misused, damaged or destroyed. These land trusts can vary in their oversight, protecting anything from archeological sites to scenic corridors.

One of the most important types of conservationary land trusts is to provide protection for areas that are in recovery from environmental damage. One such land trust of this type is the Mt. St. Helens Conservation and recovery area. This land trust provides researchers an opportunity to see how the land surrounding the volcano has recovered naturally and get a better understanding of how the planet repairs itself after a catastrophic event such as mega eruption such as the one which took place in 1980.

Conservation land trusts have been around a long time, but with the rise in popularity of all things environmental they are becoming more commonly place. They provide for the protection of the land while still allowing it to be used for enjoyable and significant purposes such as research, education, and recreation. Without conservation land trust there would be no enforceable way to protect the lands in question while still leaving them open to the public. The only other option would be to close them off as private land and then we would all miss out on what they have to offer.

There are two types of land trust. The first is a non-profit organization, which is established to help preserve, protect and administer the lands of a publicly accessible area to which it has been granted stewardship, usually by the action of a community at large. The second is an agreement by which a parcel of land or other real estate property is controlled by one party for the benefit of another party. In this case, the first party holds ownership of the land and its development or other use is dictated accordingly with the benefits or proceeds of such development or usage being the granted possession of the second party.

For the purposes of this piece we will be discussing the latter of these two. This is often referred to as “ownership trust” and in the United States the version of such most commonly in use is the “Illinois type” which states that in order for the trust to be valid, the trustee must have in place not only the intention and ability to develop or for any other means utilize the land, but also must have a minor duty to perform in service to the actual owner (the beneficiary) such as to deed the land and its possession, up to and including all reasonable profits and improvement thereunto, to the beneficiary after a prescribed period of time. This type of trust comes from England, specifically the law of trust as regarded by the Statute of Uses, which was found to be valid by the English courts not long after the king enacted it. The opinion of the court was, however, that the statute can only be considered true and thus the trust valid if there is some action taken on the part of the trustee other than merely the holding of the land on behalf of the beneficiary and that the holding itself may not be in any direct cause to the commission of or indirect support of any illegal act.

The earliest accounts of land trust being in use can be found as far back as Roman times. During the age of King Henry VIII one of the greatest advantages of being a full citizen was the ability to own land. The only problem was that any able bodies, virile man who was a land holder had to serve in the military for a period of time. In order to get around this people would often use a land trust, thus being able to hide their true ownership of the land and not have to serve in the armies.

In more modern time the first real usage of land trust to any extent was in the early 1900s in Chicago. In this case, city leaders who were legally barred from voting on any projects which they would have the benefit of having approval authority over were able to use land trust to hide their true ownership of large amounts of land in the downtown and center city areas. These were of course prime pieces of real estate and were in high demand due to the booming popularity of building sky scrapers at the time.

These are only two examples of how ownership land trust has been used over the course of history. Land trust in itself is not a complex mechanism, but the practical application of it can at times be highly intricate and open to the interpretation of the prevailing judiciary at the time.