A dive into some promising new approaches to both funding community ownership.
And building out an ecosystem that supports its sustainability.
An enduring vision for many people across the country is to collectively own local land and buildings, thus controlling how those properties are used and who benefits from them. It’s a way for people to not only care for their neighborhoods and neighbors, but to also push back against outside influences that are exploiting and extracting value from communities. While there are some forms of community ownership—like community land trusts, limited-equity co-ops, and resident-owned manufactured housing parks—that are fairly well-known, there are new ones being developed as well to serve communities in new ways.
To round out our latest Under the Lens series, Innovations in Community Ownership, Shelterforce held a webinar on Nov. 12. Moderated by Miriam Axel-Lute, Shelterforce’s editor in chief, “Fueling the Future of Community Ownership” featured three leaders working on projects and policies that are redefining what community ownership can look like.
The speakers were:
- Deyanira Del Rio of the New Economy Project / NYC Community Land Initiative
- Roberto García Ceballos of Fideicomiso Comunitario Tierra Libre / LA Housing Training Hub
- Chris Brown of Trillium Community Land Trust / Hudson Valley Alliance for Housing and Conservation
The following transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Miriam Axel-Lute: Today we are going to hear from folks about innovative ways to finance the acquisition of land for community ownership, and about ways to develop the ecosystem that allows community ownership models to both get started and to thrive and really become something more than an outlier. Rubber to the road, real practical questions.
We’re going to start with Deyanira, and she’ll talk about the context in which she’s working on community ownership—policy context, market context, and the existing infrastructure.
Deyanira Del Rio: Thanks so much, Miriam, and everyone, for organizing today’s webinar. It’s really nice to be here with all of you. I’m joining from New York City, where New Economy Project is based. We’re a citywide organization. Our mission is to build an economy that works for all, that’s rooted in cooperation, in racial and neighborhood equity, and in ecological sustainability.
The way we do this work is by organizing coalitions and campaigns and other work that both fights against wealth extraction, and corporations and policies that are fueling inequality and poverty, and by working with groups to advance community ownership through land trusts, through public banking and other democratically controlled initiatives that build both power and collective wealth in New York City’s low-income and immigrant neighborhoods, and Black and brown communities as well.
And so one of the coalitions I’ll be talking about today that we’ve anchored for about a dozen years is the New York City Community Land Initiative (NYCCLI), [which] we call “Nicely.” I see many friends and members here today.
This coalition has, over those past dozen years, really fostered the dramatic growth of community land trusts all over New York’s five boroughs. We had one fully operational CLT when we started this work, and today we have 20 CLTs that are organizing for land and housing justice in every borough of New York City. So that’s a pretty impressive and tremendous growth.
And this movement that we’ve helped to create is really squarely focused on racial justice, on combating displacement of low-income and Black and brown New Yorkers, and addressing root causes of our affordability crisis in New York City. About 10 of those community land trusts that I mentioned, 10 of the 20, now have land that they’re stewarding, or they have land in their pipelines, to create and preserve permanently affordable housing, both deeply affordable rentals, as well as shared equity home ownership through co-ops.
They’re also doing commercial and community spaces, they’re preserving green and waterfront spaces, and meeting a real broad array of neighborhood needs. And this year, we launched an interactive map that you can click on to read about all of these groups and their specific projects across New York. This has been a tremendous lift, not just for our organization, but for the dozens of groups that make up NYCCLI, this tremendous coalition, and we’ve
really done this movement building through coalition building, not only with community land trusts, but with the tenant movement, with nonprofit developers, with the environmental justice movement here, and many others.
And we’ve carried out pretty relentless organizing, community education and outreach, policy advocacy, and much more. So I’m excited to share with you some of our updates and progress that we’ve made, and to hear from others also in this space.
Chris Brown: Hi everyone, Chris Brown. I’m broadly located in New York state’s Hudson Valley region, which encompasses about nine counties on either side of the Hudson River, all within about two hours of the New York City MSA. And we really feel that proximity, here in the region, especially in the last five years.
One of the hats that I wear is the vice president of the Trillium Community Land Trust, a pretty much brand new CLT. We were founded at the state level in December 2023, [and are] still searching for first property acquisitions, but we have a number of potential collaborations and actual collaborations, which I think we’ll get into a little bit more during the course of the conversation.
Our community land trust is also a member organization of a coalition of 16 different organizations, again, on either side of the Hudson River, within that kind of two-hour corridor of New York City. That coalition is the Hudson Valley Alliance for Housing and Conservation.
That’s eight land conservancies and eight affordable housing organizations. It was really created sort of with the idea in mind of these are two things that are not only near and dear to people in this region, but are also really essential. Affordable housing is always essential for our workforce and for other folks, and conservation is very essential in our area, somewhat because of the food production. Columbia County and the Hudson Valley writ large is responsible for much of the food production of New York state, but also there are some real, bio-essential kind of land use situations throughout our region, [so] that we have to be very careful that we’re not stepping on too many toes when we talk about development. So the idea of the Alliance for Housing and Conservation was if you have to have housing and you have to have conservation, these two systems should be working in concert instead of opposed to each other, which is sort of the baseline assumption. And we have found that there is quite a bit of overlap when these two types of organizations come to the table and start to get involved in co-development/preservation spaces. So, we’ve been looking at a lot of cluster development issues, [and] aside from just the physical space, a lot of use issues that kind of, I think, lead directly into the community-controlled conversation.
[In] the broader context of our housing situation, this region has hosted, at various times in the past five years, the hottest ZIP codes in the country, as far as year-over-year median home sale prices. It seems to not really be slowing down for our region. Columbia County, the county that I live in and do most of my work in, recently became kind of the poster child for housing price escalation in New York state. We are now the least affordable county outside of the New York City metropolitan statistical area. Our median home sales price has more than doubled in the past seven years. And during that time, real wages, real local wages have gone up about 6 percent.
We are seeing a lot of the effects of working from home. We are now one of the counties in all of New York state with the highest proportion of employees that work from home, and by and large, those occupations that those folks belong to, are located in and around New York City and pay much more than local wages do, which, of course, leads to the displacement issues that we’re seeing.
The Trillium Community Land Trust has been lucky to win a couple of pretty new state grants. New York state has a program that they’re specifically calling Community Controlled Affordable Housing. There have been two rounds of that. We’ve won some grants from local funders, a couple of foundations. But most importantly, we’ve really created a network of collaborators and potential collaborators. And like I said, we haven’t quite located our first project yet, but that is because we are suffering from the issue of a plethora of options before us, rather than a very narrow field.
And just for, tone setting, the Hudson Valley region is rural. There are only three communities in the Hudson Valley region that have more than 50,000 people within them. [That’s] a little bit of context for the degree of development and degree of densification that we exist in.
Roberto Garcia-Ceballos: My name is Roberto Garcia-Caballos. I’m a co-founder and former co-director of Fideicomiso Comunitario Tierra Libre, which is a community land trust in East LA, in Boyle Heights, and the city of LA.
Fideicomiso is also a co-founder of the LACLT Coalition. The work I’m going to be talking about is situated in the city of LA, in a housing market under extreme pressure: skyrocketing rent, escalating real estate values, gentrification, all of the displacements. And as a city, we’re also going to host the Olympics, and we’re also going to be hosting the World Cup … and then a lot of other pressures from the federal government.
And [LA is] an immigrant city as well. But I’m going to be sharing in terms of the infrastructure that we’ve been building out over the past six years.
Fideicomiso and other CLTs and other community-based groups and affordable housing developers have seen a meaningful shift in community ownership infrastructure. In LA, in 2019, the LACLT Coalition was founded, and at the time, there were two established community land trusts in the city, and three emerging ones, including Fideicomiso. Now in 2025, we are now six established CLTs, with one emerging CLT, which is the LA Chinatown Community Land Trust. And more are being developed, including one in San Gabriel and one in Altadena in response to the LA fires that just happened.
What has really helped build this infrastructure? So, in 2020, one of our early wins, we secured a $14 million pilot program for LA County, where CLTs were able to use these funds to acquire naturally occurring affordable housing to really pilot community land trusts and build permanently affordable housing. That kind of really triggered a lot of the work that we do.
And then in 2022, we passed a really important ballot measure called Measure ULA [United to House LA], via the United to House LA Coalition. And this is a real estate transfer tax that went into effect April 1, 2023. It imposes an additional tax on high-value real estate transfers: 4 percent on properties over $5 million, and 5 percent on transfers over $10 million, in the city of LA.
[Those] revenues are dedicated to affordable housing, homeless prevention, and most importantly, alternative housing models, or what we call social housing, which includes a lot of community ownership.
I think that these specific policies have been really key in developing community ownership infrastructure, outside of just having scattered CLTs doing work. I think this is really helping us think about how we build this model at scale. And just this year, I think Measure ULA has collected $800 million.
And so that’s the type of funding that’s coming into our city, to be able to do this work. But it does require a lot of coalition work.
[In response to clarifying question in the chat:] Yes, I said 800 million! We’re getting close to a billion, and it’s not the end of the year.
And so my role, specifically, and my focus has been within this ecosystem to help expand the capacity of CLTs, to advocate for funding and policy levers, and participate in building institutions. I mentioned that I’m now the former co-director of Fideicomiso, because I’m actually moving into a new role where we’re building out a new institution called the LA Housing Training Hub, which is part of ULA, to do capacity building for a lot of these new, alternative housing models that we’re experimenting in LA.
Thank you all. Obviously, one of the things that everybody is most concerned about is how we get the land, and how we get the money to develop the housing on the land. Let’s get a little more detail about some of the ways that you are working on that. Chris, can you talk about how you’re partnering with conservation groups, what that can look like on the ground, and also that specific state funding that you mentioned?
Brown: There’s actually a couple different paths that we’re exploring that have all been bearing some type of fruit. One is, find an organization that’s already doing some housing development and ask them if they want to sell you their land, right? We’ve got a couple of different nonprofit developers of various capacities, various scales, throughout the region and throughout the county. The community land trust is pretty friendly with [most if not all] of them. So having conversations with those developers pretty early on in their pre-development process, in some cases before they’ve even won their grants, that has helped tremendously to sort of start at the beginning of a project with the intention for that project to have a longer period of affordability than most subsidy programs generally accrue to themselves.
Usually in New York, our subsidy periods run either 10 or 15 years for a period of affordability, and then folks who purchase a subsidized home are free to sell their homes for as much as they’d like to. You know, it’s very similar to at the federal level, you see one of the big issues that we’re having, kind of nationally, is the expiration of many of the 30-year low-income housing tax credit developments. A lot of those properties that have been affordable since their inception likely won’t be once those tax credits expire. We’re also seeing that in our rural communities with the USDA 515 programs, which are somewhat similar, but a smaller scale. Again, these are just subsidies that are expiring unless someone does something at the policy level to change that. So, the CLT has been looking to, right off the bat, start with a longer period of affordability than some of the projects were initially incepted to have, so going beyond those 10 or 15 years.
And to their credit, New York state, or at least the housing agencies at the state level, have really started to pick up the ball with that. A lot of the newer housing subsidy programs, both rental and home ownership, either have longer periods of affordability baked into them, some sort of potential path where you could add years of affordability to them, or they are just explicitly community-controlled models. [In] New York state, there is a very undersubscribed and little-known pair of programs, New York state Housing for the Future. So this is two separate buckets of $75 million that have to be spent outside of New York City: $75 million for rentals, $75 million for homeownership. They both go up to a fairly decent income level. And they both are specifically looking for things like limited equity co-ops, community land trusts, homeownership models. So, New York state is really leaning into longer periods of affordability.
As Miriam mentioned, there’s the specific community-controlled Affordable Housing Grant Program. It’s a pretty small pool of money right now. Each round, there’s a successively larger amount of funding available. I think the idea there is that you’ve got one project that goes through all three phases of the grant funding.
But there are other grant sources out there that you can utilize. You know, I can really only speak to New York state, but I’m sure that there are some at the federal level. There’s nothing stopping someone from applying for Federal Home Loan Bank of New York subsidies and then siting those subsidized homes on community-controlled land. So there are some workarounds that you can kind of squeeze in on the edges.
Partnering with conservation groups, or local conservation groups, has actually been much more productive than I initially thought it would be. Full disclosure: I got onboarded into this alliance of land conservation and affordable housing groups, and my first question was, “Can you give us some land?”
And that’s not quite how those two groups are working together, but there are some real gains at the margins. The land conservancy organizations in this area understand that their mission is unfulfillable if there aren’t enough people in the area that live here that care about the actual environment. Otherwise, you just get people that treat it like a vacation destination and don’t really have any connection to the land. They’re also starting to understand that they can’t sustainably employ anyone unless they start caring about affordable housing. They’ve got pretty sizable staffs, and increasingly, the folks on those staffs are priced out of our region.
One thing that’s really important for rural areas, certainly ours, but to a larger extent throughout the Midwest, and then farther west as well [is] the rise of private equity acquiring manufactured home communities. [It] has become one of, if not the biggest, issues in the world of rural affordable housing.
There’s been something like a 45 percent increase in rents in manufactured homes [nationally] in the past [decade]. Private equity is, you know, snapping up these, what we would call in the housing field, naturally occurring affordable housing. Typically, this is housing that you don’t need to subsidize, because manufactured homes tend to be affordable just by the nature of being manufactured homes, and that is disappearing on a really large level across the country.
[Three or four] years ago, I had a conversation with someone about community land trusts getting involved in the manufactured housing community space, and they said, oh, you don’t need to do that. You don’t need to insure long-term affordability, because those places will always be affordable. Two and a half years later, we’re seeing that that is not true. So we have been talking to some of our manufactured housing communities and trying to connect them with ROC USA [Resident Owned Communities USA].
ROC USA is not the only game in town, but they are far and away the biggest game in town when it comes to organizing manufactured home community residents to get ahead of the game if their park community goes on sale. So that’s something that we’re paying a lot of attention to.
[In] my day job as housing development coordinator for my county, we’ve started a survey of all the manufactured home communities in our county and neighboring counties, and are hoping to pick up some more information from surrounding counties within the region. That is one of the best ways in our environment, in our rural environment, to turn what could have been, you know, a horrible story about half of a community being evicted from their homes. It’s about a [40] percent eviction rate, when these communities are purchased by private equity firms. So that is one of the biggest levers that we’ve got right now from kind of a preemptive standpoint.
There’s not a ton of money out there for folks to organize in that way, and that’s something that we’ve been having a conversation with the state about. Wouldn’t it be a great use of the funds that you’ve earmarked for the community-controlled affordable housing programs to go into keeping people in homes that have been and should stay affordable going forward?
That’s great. Shelterforce has definitely been covering the resident-owned communities movement for a while. We’re going to move from rural for a moment to urban, and go back to Roberto. You mentioned Measure ULA. Can you tell us more about how it’s structured, how it got to be putting money aside for community ownership, and how that money is being used?
Garcia-Ceballos: The coalition behind ULA includes unions, tenant organizations, and community advocates. And in the ballot, we insisted [that it] include language that directed funds to diverse affordable housing approaches, not just the standard, subsidized LIHTC [Low-Income Housing Tax Credit] programs.
Because in the past, we had passed different measures in LA to try to solve this housing crisis, and that funding goes into subsidizing LIHTC. And it didn’t really create space for too many ownership models, alternative housing models, or shared equity models. And so in the guidelines, in the way the policy is written, it has protected programs. So the funding has to specifically be used for this.
And like I said, I think ULA has about 11 programs that it funds. Within those 11 programs, there’s a program called Alternative Models of Permanent Housing, which requires CLTs, co-ops, and nonprofits to have meaningful participation and governance of the projects, and they need to be permanently affordable.
And so for us, that was really key, just to have revenue that is marked for these kinds of models, that can’t be moved or changed. That funding allocation can’t be moved to something else if the city is in a deficit; it really has to be for that.
The city just released its first notice of funding for its [new construction of alternative housing models] fund. And this year, the funding allocated was $101 million. These developments must demonstrate that they are alternative models, whether it’s a CLT, a co-op, or other permanent affordable shared equity models. And they must have proof of meaningful resident governance in them.
And the other program is the Acquisition and Rehabilitation Fund. And this year, which will go into next year, the notice [of] funding allocated about $50 million for this specific fund. It’s set aside for CLTs and nonprofits to acquire existing buildings or land, or, to be able to rehabilitate it and make it into permanently affordable housing.
Another [program] exists within these two, called the Capacity Building and Technical Assistance. It’s a dedicated program under ULA to build up organizational capacity of CLTs and co-ops, and help with governance models, resident engagement, and finance structuring. This needs to be done through a nonprofit, and, through this specific part of funding, which is 1 percent of all funding for ULA, it would generate about $6 to $8 million a year for specific capacity building.
This is why we’re building a new institution in LA, called the LA Housing Training Hub. ULA is a new revenue stream, and there’s just been a lot of complications in implementation, specifically, making sure that we had the permanent guidelines that we wanted as a community.
And so there was a period of time where a lot of us are advocating to ensure that we got the program that we wanted.
Some of the things are still being hashed out, because LA hasn’t had this sort of infrastructure in many years, specifically, like, the housing department is trying to figure out how to create regulatory agreements, and how to create the right policy to ensure the compliance of these new types of models in our city.
One of the other challenges is that ULA is constantly being attacked, and so there’s consistent threat at a state level, in terms of having ballot measures that will revoke ULA, and then at a city level, as well. So as we’re trying to implement, we’re also trying to defend this specific policy from being taken from us. It’s this constant feeling that as we’re building, we’re also protecting, and that’s been a really difficult task.
Del Rio: We do a lot of learning exchanges with mission-aligned CLTs and CLT networks, including those in LA, and it’s been really inspiring to hear and share some of these big steps, these leaps forward that we’ve made, while also defending against the anticipated attacks.
Here in New York City, [I’ll] focus on a couple of things, which include our policy campaigns that we’re waging with community land trusts and a broad coalition, actually, of 150 other groups as well as a new economy loan fund that we’ve expanded to help meet some of the needs of, New York City’s community land trusts.
At the city level, we’ve been advocating for the past several years for a package of bills that we call the Community Land Act. These bills would basically create new opportunities for community land trusts and other, community-driven nonprofits to bring land and housing into community ownership.
[The package] includes bills that would require the city, for example, to prioritize CLTs and community ownership when the city has public land that it’s going to be developing for affordable housing or community and commercial space, or whatever it is. Another bill that’s central in that in the Community Land Act is COPA, the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, which of course has passed in San Francisco and a couple of other places around the country. And what the bill would do in New York is allow community land trusts and other qualified nonprofits to have a first right to buy certain multifamily buildings when a landlord decides to sell. We co-drafted and have been fighting for this bill for about five years now.
And we’ve made huge progress. We were just this morning at a rally with 150 other groups on the steps of City Hall, celebrating that we’ve secured a veto-proof supermajority in the City Council of sponsors to advance COPA. We’re pushing really hard for the current council to bring it to a vote this year. There’s other bills as well that we were rallying for that would dramatically expand pipelines for community land trusts and others to take land and housing off of the speculative market for good. So, we’re very excited about that. It’s going to come with a lot of other funding demands.
That’s at the local level. This builds also on funding that we’ve been able to secure from New York City since about 2019, when we were able to work with the City Council to get funding in the city’s budget to support community land trusts [for] their organizing expenses, operating expenses, as well as citywide technical assistance, for these growing CLTs. The 20-plus CLTs that I mentioned are emerging or established across our city. We’ve been able to secure about $1.5 million per year through that funding initiative. That’s really helped sort of seed and catalyze some of the community land trusts that we’re getting off the ground. And it’s strengthened policymakers’ understanding of CLTs, which has kind of paved the way for us to go back with broader policy demands now.
At the state level, you heard about the Community Controlled Affordable Housing Program from Chris. That’s supporting CLTs and other groups statewide. We also, just this year, were able to secure funding for New York City CLTs, again, more operating support for local land trusts that are doing affordable housing development. And so these are some of the ways that we’re building capacity and infrastructure to sustain CLTs.
At the state level, we’ve also been waging a really, big campaign to win TOPA, the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act. Very similar to COPA, but this would be statewide, it would apply to a broader universe of properties, and it would give tenants the first right to organize and make collective bids to purchase their buildings and bring [them] into resident control. Very similar to COPA. We’ve been co-leading that campaign with Housing Justice for All, the statewide tenant coalition that won these pretty groundbreaking rent reform laws in 2019. And, those were, you know, all of these campaigns also have been, very helpful in fostering on-the-ground partnerships between tenants that are organizing in their buildings, and community land trusts and other mission-driven nonprofits.
And through those relationships, there have been a growing number of what we call tenant takeover campaigns, where tenants and CLTs are working together to bring landlords to the table, to bring enforcement agencies to the table, where landlords have a number of violations and there’s other leverage. And really to facilitate ways that the tenants with community land trusts and other partners can collectively buy their buildings from their landlords.
The East New York CLT did this about a year and a half ago. They were able to bring a 20-unit building into community ownership and the residents now are working with the CLT to make the repairs that they’ve been fighting for a number of years, and it’s been a really inspiring model, for others to replicate.
TOPA or COPA, either one of these bills passing, would basically strengthen and help multiply those kinds of campaigns around the city. So we’re incredibly excited about this and gearing up for, you know, all the implementation kind of steps that will follow.
We also have at New Economy Project a loan fund that is specifically created to make no-interest and low-interest loans in community ownership. It’s about a $2.5 million fund. We’re looking to double it in the next couple of years. And we’ve put out about $1.3 million in loans. Zero interest to 3 percent, 4 percent interest loans.
And we’re supporting community land trusts with pre-development and rehab loans. We’ve just expanded our loan capacity to be able to make up to half a million dollars towards acquisitions and other expenses. We’ve also supported worker-owned businesses and community solar projects, and a number of other non-housing, non-CLT kinds of projects around the city.
So we’re incredibly excited to keep growing that. It’s an emerging CDFI. We’ve gotten some federal technical assistance awards to support the growth of our loan fund, and we’re in the process of applying for certification. Anyone who knows about the federal CDFI fund know that we have impeccable timing to be applying right now. But we are hopeful that this program, this fund, will continue to exist, and that’ll open up some additional opportunities for us to be able to build up our fund.
What we’re doing [is] relatively modest, but we’re making really creative, strategic loans that can fill gaps. Pre-development financing that can be really hard to get, that then opens up a much bigger pool of next-stage financing for projects. For example, we’ve also partnered with lots of other mission-aligned lenders to be able to bring more capital into the space.
That’s going to be a piece of the puzzle for COPA or TOPA implementation, to have some nimble, private sources of funding for groups that want to seize these acquisition opportunities that will suddenly be before them, or that they’ve been organizing towards for many years, and while they’re waiting, applying for public financing and other permanent capital.
I would just want to add here that all of this infrastructure we’re developing is really being shaped by, and meant to support, the organizing campaigns by CLTs on the ground. I mentioned the East New York example. There’s other CLTs that have been working to redevelop vacant and blighted public land in the city. So there are groups that have successfully organized and pushed the city, for example, to put out RFPs on sites that the city owns right now and isn’t using—putting out RFPs that the CLTs have called for to redevelop a vacant site in the South Bronx into a health, education, and arts center.
There’s a site in western Queens that the city, under the last administration and state, actually, were going to give away to Amazon as its second headquarters, and the community fought back, defeated that plan, and then a lot of the groups and residents and activists that were in that campaign then formed a community land trust and came up with their own community-led proposal for the same site, and so they recently pushed and got the city to put out a request for expressions of interest to develop the site, and they’re moving forward on that as well.
So there’s tons of tremendous organizing that has also created pipelines for the CLTs now, and also really made the case for these much bigger policy demands that we’re making together.
It is so great to hear good news and good things happening, so thank you all for sharing those. [We’ve gotten] a couple specific questions that were about these particular things that you just mentioned. Roberto, there were two questions for you. One, is the ULA funding limited to the city of Los Angeles?
Garcia-Ceballos: Yeah, it doesn’t cover the other cities in LA. LA County has 88 cities, so, it covers the biggest city.
And the other question: Who is it who’s trying to get rid of ULA?
Garcia-Ceballos: Oh, there’s a long list, but I think the biggest hurdle we overcame was a lawsuit from the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association. This lawsuit really delayed the implementation of ULA. ULA started collecting money immediately, but we couldn’t spend it because of this lawsuit that we went through. Luckily, we’ve won it, but now, that same organization and groups across the state, specifically apartment associations, and other real estate developers are now, threatening to move on a statewide ballot initiative that would overturn, not just ULA, but potentially other ballot measures across the state.
That’s a huge threat that we’re worried about, and in the grapevine of what’s happening, we’re also hearing that there might be attempts to amend ULA using City Council next year. And then there was a threat maybe two months ago, where our own mayor tried to make a move during the state legislation.
And so this is the type of pressure we’re feeling: we have to balance the defense and the implementation of ULA.
I wanted to ask a question to Chris about going back to the working with conservation organizations. I know of a case in Connecticut, and I think I heard that there was a case in the Hudson Valley also where there’s something like a farm that is being sold, the farmer may have passed on, and there can be an arrangement where the woodlot or the farming part remains in conservation, but the part where there was already buildings can be developed for housing. Is that something that has come up, in that partnership?
Brown: Yes, I can’t speak to the specifics of that project, but there were about 110 acres of farmland along one of our main county highways that runs really throughout the region, our county into the next, and the southernmost 10 or so acres were pretty close to a village center that had some form of infrastructure. (That’s one of the big challenges of developing anything in our area, is the lack of infrastructure.) One hundred of those 110 acres will be sold to smaller-scale farmers instead of just one massive operation.
And then those last 10 acres will be given over to some kind of, permanent—well, long-term— affordable, housing arrangements. I think it’s going to be some combination of rental and homeownership. The really important part of that entire project is that the 110 acres were purchased from the private market by the town itself. This is the town of Red Hook, New York, and the only way that they were able to make that purchase happen was they tapped into an incentive zoning fund bank that they essentially had. So, for a little over a decade, I believe, they had an incentive zoning law on the books, that if you were a developer that came in, if you wanted to acquire additional density you could pay into a fund, or you can make some of the additional density units affordable. By and large, developers would rather pay into a fund than make some portion of those units affordable, or at least that was the case in Red Hook.
So over the years, they’ve built up a pretty significant treasure chest of funding that they could use, and much of those funds, if not all of them, they might have depleted to purchase those 110 acres from the private market.
We’ve had multiple conversations around those types of opportunities, where we know that there’s a project going forward, and we know that it’s being undertaken by what we might consider a friendly developer, and that’s probably the biggest one that we’ve been kind of circling in the past few months.
I also want to give a shout out to all the New York area community land trusts [and] the supporting organizations, too, that aren’t necessarily boots on the ground, but do a lot of the work that makes our work possible.
Hear, hear. This work takes a lot of, infrastructure, it takes a lot of support, it can take a lot of training, there’s a lot of ramping up, there’s a lot of exchange between organizations. Let’s talk about the work that you’re doing in your areas to develop that ecosystem, starting with Deyanira, about your shared services model and work like that in New York City.
Del Rio: As I think you’ve heard, we’ve been working really closely together as a field, as a movement, for a dozen years. And, you know, it’s through the coalition and campaign organizing, it’s also through a two-year, pretty in-depth learning exchange we did with a cohort of about a dozen CLTs from 2017 to 2019. We worked with Enterprise Community Partners on that, as well as HPD [Housing Preservation and Development], our [NYC] housing agency, and others.
We’ve been continuing to follow this model of having groups do teach-backs and share their learning, their successes, their challenges with each other. We do learning exchanges with groups all over the country, as I mentioned, and also build up capacity through training and technical assistance. The coalition includes a technical assistance network of legal services groups, including TakeRoot Justice, and there’s divisions in CUNY [City University of New York] that have been long supporting emerging community land trusts, and many others. So there’s a lot of support organizations, as you heard, that are shoring up and really working to strengthen the amazing grassroots work that the CLTs themselves are doing.
Building on all of that, we’re now designing a deeper shared-services model that is really meant to support these community land trusts as they reach their next stages of growth. Supporting their long-term sustainability, and helping them build scale and capacity while, very critically, making sure that the model, the collaboration, preserves authentic community control. That’s super important to us. We’re in still a nascent stage of planning for what we’re calling shared services as a shorthand. But I want to underscore that it’s incredibly important for us that this is grassroots designed, and that it’s really supporting the neighborhood-led organizing and planning, all of that deep work that’s at the heart of the CLT model. Without that, I think we won’t have success. And I think we’re all aligned on that page.
What we’re thinking about, as all of these groups are growing, is how do we build collective infrastructure capacity so that every grassroots group around the city—it’s a big city, but still, we don’t want 20 tiny organizations all having to hit the same walls, learn the same lessons, build the same capacity, replicate the same wheels.
How do we collectively come together and figure out how to streamline some of that? Can we centralize certain functions, maybe have some shared staffing so that groups can have a backbone organization that they go to for support? Can we put together a list of vetted consultants that then we cultivate and train so that they know how to work with community land trusts specifically, [and] they understand how that model works? We’re looking at other pieces as well, maybe developing a distinct entity that can really focus on the financing needs of community land trusts.
What we’ve done so far is have these one-on-one needs assessments, learning about groups’ interests, their needs, their restraints, and what their priorities would be for collaboration at this kind of operational level.
We’ve done a ton of learning, with and from other CLT collaborations around the country, from practitioners involved in those efforts. We’ve also connected with other CLT networks around the country to learn about their experiences and what’s worked, what challenges have they hit.
We have secured pro bono legal support for the project, and we’re right now, with partners, designing what we hope will become a pilot that can launch soon, where we’re testing some of these approaches to see what works, to work out kinks, and figure out a feasible long-term structure.
I think one of the things that we are really excited about is that we have this long history and close relationships built over this very deep work together, through the New York City Community Land Initiative, through the funding initiatives that we all take part in, and other existing collaborations.
That’s a really critical piece of something that feels maybe intangible, but is really core to structuring this kind of long-term collaboration. So that’s what we’re working on, in addition to making sure we have robust policy and funding support and all the other resources that CLTs need to sustain and continue to thrive over the long term.
It’s exciting to see that happening, because we’ve seen that idea come up over time in the past, but always in places where the central organization that’s providing the services was created before there was a critical mass of CLTs present, and even though it makes sense in some ways to have the support present before the local organizing, it seems like maybe having the energy of the local organizing and that critical mass first may be the way to go.
Deyanira: Yeah, when the coalition first formed, it considered [launching shared services first], and explicitly decided against that for the reasons that I think you’re alluding to, which is that we wanted to make sure that whatever took shape was responsive to the grassroots CLTs getting off the ground, and so that’s where the coalition really has directed the bulk of its energy—all of the training, the organizing, the education and outreach, and just really making sure that we have robust, well-structured grassroots CLTs, helping those, you know, organic community-led efforts succeed first.
Roberto, you’ve mentioned the LA Housing Training Hub. Tell us about it.
Garcia-Ceballos: A lot of conversations about capacity building have been happening in LA for some time. I mentioned the pilot program earlier. Part of that pilot program was to convert these developments into resident-owned models, or community-owned models. Only one of the buildings—out of eight—was able to convert within the timeline that we had talked about.
And I think one of the reflections we had was just that there was a lot of gap within the ecosystem in LA around capacity building, around being able to train not only residents, but also organizations in this shift from a tenant-landlord relationship—even within an affordable housing model—to get your property management, get your asset management on board to really see the residents as part owners or decision makers, right?
And so, as we were writing ULA, and we were thinking about how we were going to implement ULA. Even before it passed, a lot of us went down a rabbit hole around where do we find the right models to learn from.
Some of us went to Vienna, and Vienna just felt super distant. And then for us, a very practical example and clear example for us was reading about UHAB in New York City. And thinking about all the units they have developed and turned into limited equity housing co-ops [and asking] how do they do that? How do they sustain that for decades? How did this investment from the city really become long-term? And not just the life of the tax credit, but really thinking about the people, and the capacity building, and the institutions that needed to be built out.
And so for us, that’s where the LA Housing Training Hub is really inspired. The guidelines, we’re really thinking about ensuring, that these developments didn’t just have capital, but that they were going to require support around governance infrastructure, like resident capacity, ongoing technical assistance, like operations planning and legal and financial expertise.
Without that sort of infrastructure, we knew that even the most well-funded projects were going to struggle, and one of the big struggles that we saw was mission drift. One of the things that I learned in doing this research in LA on where all the mutual housing associations went, or where are the limited equity housing co-ops that existed, what happened? A lot of them went back into the market. And they reverted to the market-rate kind of logic after equity had been built.
These are some of the contexts that we’re really thinking about as we’re thinking of scale.
The LA Housing Training Hub is a collaborative of organizations in LA. It’s still not its own institution, but its mission is to provide technical assistance and training programs that grow LA’s social housing ecosystem.
We do this by empowering historically marginalized low- to moderate-income and BIPOC residents to collectively govern and make decisions about their housing in partnership with land stewards, housing developers, and property managers.
We think the hub is really important, because in LA, there hasn’t been an investment in collective ownership and governments in decades. And what I mean by that is that there hasn’t been a space for trainees—tenants who are organizing their building—[to] learn what the pathway is to buy their building.
And it’s very similar to the conversations we’re having about TOPA, right? And also building knowledge and systems for residents, developers, and community-based organizations to collaborate in the sustaining a limited equity housing co-op, or sustaining a strong resident council in an affordable housing development building.
For us this is really important, because this is an opportunity, a really important one, where there is funding to really build out a system and infrastructure that has been missing in the equation to build an ecosystem. The hub will offer training and tools for governance, budgeting, and operations for the developer and for the tenants; technical assistance from pre-development through operations; and then leadership development for resident decision-making.
We know that governance is really important, and even after a governing body is built out, maybe 5 or 10 years from now there’s going to be a shift in leadership, and new leadership needs to be developed in these buildings and within this ecosystem.
And then compliance and monitoring systems for long-term sustainability. We don’t want to see a co-op, or a resident council fall out of compliance because they didn’t have the training for it, because they didn’t have the support, because they didn’t have the right monitoring tools to ensure when a document needed to be submitted, or when they needed to have an election. A lot of these, sometimes are very simple, but really make a difference in terms of the survival of a co-op or a resident council.
And so for us, as we understood our ecosystem in LA, we knew we needed partners. And the way we applied for the RFP, or the request for proposal from the city was creating a collaborative of multiple organizations. We brought in a respected foundation to be our administrator, which is the Liberty Hill Foundation, here in LA. Fideicomiso Comunitario Tierra Libre is the staff host, and kind of the host of the leadership for the Hub.
And then we brought two big organizations that work with affordable housing developers, ACT-LA and SCANPH [Southern California Association of Non-Profit Housing].
And then, of course, we needed to have other CLTs, so we brought in Beverly-Vermont Community Land Trust as our local trainer.
And then we brought some outsider folks from LA who are allies, folks really committed to this. One is the California Center for Cooperative Development, and the other one is UHAB New York. UHAB was really clear [that they were not going to] open UHAB California, [but said] we’re going to support you in building out the institution that you need, and we thought that that was really helpful, and now it’s been a two- to three-year collaboration with them, and we’ve been sending folks to their national training institute. I’m a graduate of it.
Also, with the California for Center of Cooperative Development, we’ve gone through their trainings, we’re collaborating more in terms of making sure that there’s more capacity here in LA.
And at the moment the LA Housing Training Hub hasn’t launched. We’re trying to cross the finish line in ensuring that we have a contract; this would be a 4-year contract, for us to be able to build out this work, build out the institution, [and] move out of this collaborative and more into a formal organization.
My hope is that we move from isolated projects, because when I started this work,
especially when I started Fideicomiso Comunitario Terra Libre, it felt like it was these pocket projects that were happening around building a CLT, and having to fundraise for it, having to think about all the internal capacity, sometimes it felt like we were replicating that.
We built the LACLT Coalition. The LACLT Coalition now shares resources, interacts, fundraises together, does all these things. But now, with the LA Housing Training Hub, now it’s time to really build out a robust ecosystem of community ownership in LA that can really scale and replicate the type of developments we want. And it’s not just a CLT development—yes, I think the priority should be CLTs, always, in my opinion—but if an affordable housing developer wants to move in to this sort of ecosystem, at least they’re going to do it in a way that’s guided through experts.
If they’re going to consider doing limited equity housing co-ops, resident councils, or allowing tenant associations to really organize in their buildings through building out a governing structure in their building, they’re going to really need the support and the infrastructure to sustain that.
NeighborWorks is a really good place to start, but then, what happens after your NeighborWorks contract ends? At least the city will now have a place [that] really sustains all these different approaches to community ownership, alternative housing models, and shared equity models. And so that’s why we’re building the LA Housing Training Hub.
We have a question from Australia, and I’m going to pair it with another question, because they’re both about the loan fund, the New Economy Project loan fund. One, where do the funds come from for it? Access to finances is a big challenge in Australia for doing this work. And then the other question is, how has the process been for finding permanent financing for both CLTs and co-ops, and what sets borrowers up to be able to get that funding?
Del Rio: Our loan fund so far has been largely capitalized with donated capital from donors that are not seeking a return, but rather have restricted the funds for use as revolving capital, that they want to see revolve to different community ownership projects. It actually is an outgrowth of two prior loan funds that we operated. One was a revolving loan fund for deferred action applicants, immigrant New Yorkers that were eligible to apply for deferred action when that policy was created in 2012. It was meant to overcome some of the financial obstacles that were preventing people from applying and getting immigration relief and work authorization and such.
That was a zero-interest revolving fund that we then converted into grants when the first Trump administration moved to end the program. Before that, we had created in 2008 a foreclosure prevention gap loan program with a couple of local community development lenders, community development credit unions, and another loan fund as well, to make very low-cost and deferred mortgages to homeowners that had been at risk of foreclosure because of predatory subprime loans. And so that’s how we initially generated the capital. And then when we wound down those programs—in the case of the foreclosure fund, we worked with the city and state to scale that up into a public financing program—we were able to move our donated capital, over into this New Economy Loan Fund.
As we’ve generated interest, a little bit of interest that’s grown, we’ve also secured some CDFI, community development financial institution, fund support mostly for capacity building. And at the moment we’re talking with other donors as well as foundations about ways they can support and help us grow the fund. We’re a little unique in that way, and we’ve been passing along those no-cost funds into zero or close-to-zero interest rate loans.
A question from the chat for any of you: The zoning commission in D.C. is on the verge of a massive upzoning of a certain area around Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues, and the tenant opportunity to purchase won’t apply because they’re new buildings for the next 15 years. Do you have thoughts about what could be demanded of the Zoning Commission to lay the groundwork for some community ownership in this area, so that the benefit of that upzoning doesn’t just all go to private speculators?
Brown: I’ll be brave and say that I do not. Yeah, it’s sticky with the newly developed buildings, if there’s not something baked in. At the ground level, it’s really hard to do when it’s new builds like that. But that’s a great question to generate some research on our end, because I think you’re probably going to see that pop up in quite a few places.
While the others are thinking, I will just say that the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy would probably say this is an opportunity for what they call value capture, which is to say the government is creating the extra benefit here by the upzoning, and so they do have a right to demand something in return for it, and that’s the framing that I would bring into whatever conversation you would be looking for, whether it’s inclusion of affordable housing, or some funding of something, or a different model of the Opportunity to Purchase Act. It certainly can be a hard lift, but that’s the concept that I think a lot of us want to have out there: when the public sector generates value, the public sector should get something back for the public good.
Another question from the chat: We’ve been talking a lot about CLTs. What about housing co-ops? I know that UHAB, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, which Roberto mentioned, actually works and has worked primarily with housing co-ops. Can you talk a little bit about how those two models are still active and work together?
Garcia-Ceballos: Yeah, there’s a resurging of the model. It’s always been around. Here in LA, it’s always really interesting when we meet with a limited equity housing co-op that has been around for, like, 30 years, and has been run by working-class, immigrant families. And it just demonstrates how good it is.
Housing co-ops are just really difficult to build, and then to continue with compliance, because of legal jargon and legal procedures that need to happen. But I think we’re still very hopeful that that could really be built out, and I think here, when you match a co-op and a CLT, it really creates a really good formula, because the CLT brings in the permanent affordability and the long-term stewardship, and then the co-op really builds in decision-making, resident ownership, and governance of the structure. And I think for us, those are ideal matches.
And like I said, I think LA still needs to produce a regulatory agreement for when ULA is used for limited equity co-op. And for us, we want to make sure that it doesn’t make it harder for tenants to meet compliance, and that it actually kind of allows working-class people to own their buildings. And so, for me, I think, as the hub grows, and as we start doing our work, I think it’s going to be really important to uplift that, and to encourage not just CLTs to use the model, but to even encourage nonprofit affordable housing developers to use the model as well.
Del Rio: I think that’s right, yeah. I realize we just dived in and didn’t really explain how community land trusts work, so I’m sorry for that. That was really a missed opportunity there. [Editor’s note: here’s an explanation!] I would say that the core thing to understand is that it is a flexible model that can work with all sorts of housing types and all sorts of other development on top, and that’s been a real huge focus in New York, making sure that policymakers and funders and city and state agencies understand that it’s housing and much more, and that it includes deeply affordable rental housing, [and] can be shared equity or limited equity cooperatives.
In New York City, we have a lot of co-ops, most of them are not low-income, but the ones that are [have] different formulas to protect the affordability, and that’s the part that Roberto was talking about, that the CLTs can make sure these co-ops are actually adhering to those restrictions and maintaining reserves for the building and doing all sorts of compliance, making sure that the buildings stay compliant with regulatory agreements and things like that.
I think everyone here knows that the CLTs just have that layer of protection, and so it works with all the different models, and depending on neighborhoods and your specific place where you’re working, there might be different models in addition.
Another question from the chat: What do you think does and doesn’t work in creating stronger and more diverse coalitions to push for more permanently affordable housing models? For example, rural farmers and urban workers working together.
Brown: I can speak to some of that. I’ve got to be honest, when you’re addressing diverse stakeholders—who may or may not all be on the same page about [whether] we even have an affordable housing crisis, and if we do, what does the Overton window look like, right, as far as these are the things that we are willing to do to enact policy prescriptions?—one of the best things to do, or one of the things that I found most effective, is to really have your data in order, and have it across both space and time. So what I mean by that is, in space, you can either speak to specifically your area and how your area compares to, your region, your state, the nation, whatever the case may be. And then time is really important. If you tell someone right now, 50 percent of our county is housing cost burdened, that doesn’t mean as much to them as if you tell them that right now, 50 percent of our county is housing cost burdened, and 10 years ago, it was 20 percent, right? Now you’re kind of contextualizing it.
What’s been really helpful here is actually part of what’s been really harmful. Increasingly, these stories become personalized, because the policymakers that you’re talking to have children who can’t afford to move back to the area they grew up in. Or they’ve got children who can’t afford to move out of the house, right? There’s a sort of tongue-in-cheek term that we’ve coined here, “naturally occurring intergenerational housing.” That’s literally just your 23-year-old son can’t find an apartment. That’s naturally occurring intergenerational housing.
So making it personal has worked really well when making it kind of broadly emotional hasn’t worked. But there are some real economic benefits specifically to community land trusts. It is one of the most economically efficient versions of affordable housing that you could possibly think of. You know, the idea is that if your usual period of affordability is 10 or 15 years, you have to go out and find a subsidy for the next family every time you build a new unit. If you’ve got a CLT where you sort of have this secondary market or alternative market of homes that are always there, you don’t have to have as many fights as you would if you didn’t have that kind of alternate economy set up.
I think there was a broader question in here about the Nordic model’s history, and I know Roberto name-checked Vienna before. This comes up a lot, and it comes up in a lot of different contexts. A lot of the policy prescriptions from other countries work because they’ve got very different marginal tax rates and very different ideas about what gets taxed and what doesn’t, and how that tax money gets used. So I guess I would caution a little bit, you know, just be aware of what can you fix at the level that you’re operating at, and then what’s going to be a lever that you need to lean on a little bit longer?
I don’t think we’re going to approach a Vienna-type tax policy at a national level, but I know that there are things like in New York state, we’ve got the Social Housing Development Authority bill that has come up a couple times, which is basically Mitchell-Lama 2.0—I think [that’s] one of the ways it’s very often referred to. And that’s the state using public dollars to create housing that it itself will manage. We’ve done it before, we could do it again.
So I would say that there aren’t too many brand new ideas out here. Even community land trusts have been around for, at this point, 60 years, just about a little bit longer.
Del Rio: I’ll say that one pretty radical (for this country) idea that we’re pushing in New York City and state is the idea of a public bank. There’s a whole separate city and statewide coalition that’s been pushing for that in New York, but it includes a lot of the community land trusts and the other kinds of community wealth-building initiatives around the city and state that really see public banks as a way to add more firepower, more resources, into this work. The idea is that cities or states could use their public dollars, their deposits that right now are held at the big banks that largely are not investing in local communities—or certainly not in community ownership—in many places. That by putting deposits into a public bank that’s chartered to invest in these kinds of initiatives and in local economic development, it’s a way that the city can leverage its deposits, its funding to work for the public good. I have to put that out there.
And the other thing is, we’ve done a lot of broad coalition building, not just with community land trusts and the sort of base-building groups that often form the CLTs, but also bringing it into our policy coalitions, for example, you know, the dozens and dozens of nonprofit developers, the community development corporations, and others around the city, and their trade association. Because in many cases, the community land trusts are going to partner with those other mission-aligned developers on the project, so that’s been really important.
Also, again, building with the tenant movement, with labor groups, with other environmental justice and youth groups. We’ve actually had this really powerful youth coalition put [Community Opportunity to Purchase Act] as one of their top priorities, and they’ve been adding a lot of amazing, youthful energy into the campaign as well.
Great, thank you. I think that that’s a great note to end on, those expansive ideas about where we can be going forward. I want to thank all of the participants, and everybody who’s been engaging in the chat and asking useful and interesting questions, and for all the work that you guys are doing.
