The interest of community land trusts in the Unites States appear to provide many under-served, marginal groups with a reprieve from the constant pressures of mere survival. At its best, community land trusts are supposed to empower members of the community by preserving affordable housing, through rental or ownership, thus relieving many households of exposure to at market housing rates, unaccessible loan terms, and homelessness. At its worst, these partnerships can be maintained at high operating costs born both by the City and the renters, with the owners using invariably low costs to increase his or her return as the property is sold at a high market rate. While a spectrum of possibilities exist for how CLTs can manifest, these questions remain: Why are there so few CLTs in existence? Why isn’t there a greater push towards adopting the CLT model in other metropolitan areas?
Tom Angotti presents a number of potential reasons why CLTs have had varied degrees of success in a given area. Many conditions apply to the preservation of affordable housing in a given community, Angotti cites a number of them. Primarily, a community’s predisposition to single-family homeownership versus multi-family leases provided a great consideration for the purpose of a CLT. If a population was more inclined to single-family dwellings, as is the case in Burlington, VT, providing resources for low-income homeownership seems to be the greatest opportunity to remedy plight beset by the community. However, in the case of Cooper Square, the densely populated Lower East Side created conditions under which renting was the only option, as many community members were accustomed to living in multi-family buildings and did not have the means to satisfy mortgage minimums. Additionally, many families at risk of being displaced by city intervention were historically excluded from the existing low-income co-op buildings once championed by the labor unions. Therefore, the purpose of the Cooper Square CLT lay not in subsidizing homeownership but in providing below-market housing to community members in need, indefinitely.
Learning from unintended consequences of previous partnerships between the city and shared-equity co-ops, the Cooper Square CLT was born out of a resistance to land banking by those who opted to sell their property to at-market buyers during times of speculation or development. This process generated immense wealth for many previously impoverished community members, and the programs that supported it had forsaken intentions to preserve affordable housing(in perpetuity). By concentrating its efforts on rental opportunities, the Cooper Square CLT removes a layer where speculative incentive entices owners into selling because it places a ceiling on rent born by households. Angotti believes this model to be superior for other densely-populated metropolitan areas because it releases the pressure of exorbitant housing costs by keeping the rent prices well below market. In theory with lower housing costs, members of this community will have greater access to disposable income, which will consequently be recycled within the community. This ideal closed loop is an intended consequence of rental-based CLTs. Additionally unlike other CLTs that rely heavily on government subsidies to balance development and operating costs, the Cooper Square CLT limits its exposure to government subsidies or integrates loan repayment into its structure. This narrowed relationship between the city and the CLT lends itself to being a relatively better investment for the city (opposed to ownership-based CLTs), thus can and should be used as a successful example of socially controlled land in the interest of preserving affordable housing in densely packed metropolitan city (where a great proportion of the low-income community rents). Hopefully, in the age of rampant and aggressive gentrification, community members can rally themselves together as in the case of Cooper Square to delineate safe haven boundaries. As affordable housing continues to disappear as if it was never there in the first place, CLTs offer a means for a community to mobilize against corporate community renewal and exert their own control over their space. What are the barriers for entry for CLTs? And how can we get other communities on board?
The CLT model does sound like a fabulous solution, doesn’t it? You might find this project produced by a former student interesting: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=fbefe8d4734645408deebfd16560c28c
It seems to me that the barriers to creating more CLTs are threefold: 1) Land and property costs in New York are now too high for small, community-based organizations to purchase either, 2) Land trusts rely on organized communities and many low-income communities that would benefit from such frameworks are facing such rapid displacement that they are no longer geographically concentrated enough to build power, 3) The desire for ownership as a wealth-generator is powerful. At a time when employment is precarious, wages are stagnating, and the cost of living is rising, the only relatively reliable source of wealth generation is property ownership. It can be a family’s nest-egg, its retirement plan, or, in less financial terms, its place-inheritance. CLTs rely on a communitarian view of housing, which focuses on the health, wealth, and shelter of an entire community, rather than the health, wealth, and shelter of an individual or family. In this country, at least, it’s hard to think that way because the U.S. and especially New York are anchored in a concept of individual rights and responsibility. Indeed, Teddy Roosevelt, who is credited with the concept of “rugged individualism,” was a New Yorker. So the question may not be: why aren’t there more CLTs? Rather, it may be: How can we begin to see each others’ struggle as just as compelling as our own?