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10c. Affordable Housing's Forever Solution Are community land trusts the answer for cities seeking neighborhood stability? STORY BY Jake Blum�art Twitter PHOTOGRAPHY BY Cheryl Senter PUBLISHED ON Aug 10, 2015 When Evelyn Correa first moved to Boston, she refused to walk around her neighborhood alone. Arriving in the city in 1987, she moved in with her husband and his parents in the Upham's Corner section of North Dorchester, then a blighted area in a floundering city. Their new home was at the heart of Boston's urban crisis, a chain of neighborhoods in Dorchester and Roxbury that had been redlined into instability and crisis decades earlier. Today, Correa's home and her neighborhood are wholly different, in large part due to the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI). During the 1980s, this energetic neighborhood organization convinced the city that it could steward and revitalize its surroundings and did so using a then unheard of inethod: a community land trust. Through their land trust, Dudley Neighbors Incorporated,DSNI took possession of most of the dozens of vacant lots that pocked the area, either by purchasing them from private owners using foundation money or obtaining them for almost nothing from the city. DSNI then removed the properties from the private market, leasing them out to developers under Dudley Neighbors, with the caveat that properties remain permanently affordable. Correa's house belongs to her, but the land beneath it belongs to Dudley Neighbors, which will ensure that if she ever sells, it will be to someone of a similar income. �� � -� 4�l q . ��' I � � �-- ` * ��' . � � � --� � � � "1\ � ` I�I . J' .• .. - . - �01�1�'� i �t;; "My dream was always to own my own home, but with the housing situation in Boston, everything was always so expensive," says Correa, who works for the school district, and became president of Dudley Neighbors in 2014. "... I just love having my little house. I hope to hand it down to my kids." Dudley Neighbors is the largest big city housing land trust, by number of housing units, in the United States. The group owns over half the acreage in a 62-acre corner once rife with neglect; today vacant lots can be counted on one hand. Two hundred and twenty-five permanently affordable homeownership and rental housing units now sit where weeds once grew tall and trash piled high. The most notoriously blighted parcels in the area were transferred to the land trust and have been transformed into a beautiful park. A large greenhouse and an urban farm also sit on its land. Correa's neighborhood is not the only part of Boston to transform over the last few decades. The city as a whole is a far more prosperous place than it was in 1987. One of the big city winners of the postindustrial economy, Boston has experienced record growth in recent years, sending rents skyrocketing across the city, even in working-class enclaves like Dorchester and Roxbury. A report released earlier this year found that 38