Keeping Affordable Housing Affordable

One of the greatest challenges with affordable housing, aside from creating affordable units, has always seemed to me, to be maintaining units in affordable programs. New York City’s rent stabilization policies, I have always felt, are too relaxed, as allowing units to return to market rate simply through turnover, seems to unfairly advantage those who took advantage of the program when it began. Similarly, the Mitchell-Lama program widely utilized in post Second World War development and redevelopment projects in New York City, also unfairly advantage original owners who took advantage of the program at its inception. The Mitchell-Lama program was a subsidized home ownership program, which aimed to make middle class home ownership in urban areas viable and desirable. The program was undoubtedly very helpful to the many families who took advantage of this in the 1950’s and 60’s. The program, in my opinion, however, had a major flaw. After a period of time, the shareholders of the cooperatively owned buildings could vote to leave the program, allowing them to sell their units at market rate, thus removing the unit from affordability. The flaws in both rent stabilization, and Mitchell-Lama type affordable housing programs, seem to be addressed by community land trusts. The community land trust model’s emphasis on long term sustainability and affordability, through the assertion of greater control over land use than traditionally seen, provides great benefit over the traditional affordable housing programs. Their combination of private, non-profit structure, with their eligibility for government subsidies also makes for an intriguing model. As Karen Gray explains in “Community Land Trusts in the United States”, the practice of using collective land ownership and leasing ground to the individual tenants offsets the costs of home ownership, allowing people to own or rent what is important, a home, without having to pay for the ground on which it sits. Development on the basis of ground leasing is a popular practice outside the United States, and has been particularly important in the development of England for hundreds of years, however, the land is typically controlled and developed by for-profit entities. By capping profits, CLT’s protect the interests of both current and future homeowners. The nuanced, well thought out, and delicately balanced structure of community land trusts seem to improve on the most obvious shortcomings of more traditional affordable housing programs, providing low and middle income people with the security and stability of truly affordable housing.