2015-08-18_HRA_Agenda_Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

10c. the price of land — and housing — continue to skyrocket and more working- and middle-class people are forced farther into the distant suburbs. "Community land trusts are still a pretty niche solution, and scalability is a serious challenge," says Ethan Handelman, the National Housing Conference's vice president for policy and advocacy. "Too often with affordable housing the pressure to create it only comes when the property values have already risen. We need to take a longer-term view and buy low. One of the things we should be doing in areas of distress — Philly, Detroit, parts of Florida — we should be buying stuff cheap now and putting it in long-term trust." Bringing Trusts to Scale The earliest community land trusts were created in the aftermath of the great civil rights victories of the 1960s. The first was established outside Albany, Georgia, in 1969 by movement leaders who hoped to secure ownership of agricultural land for poor African-American farmers. Until the 1980s community land trusts were based in rural areas and housing remained a secondary concern. The first urban effort began in 1981, in a Cincinnati neighborhood where community leaders feared that rising housing prices would push out their constituents. "When the model made that leap from the country to the city, the highest concern [became] affordable housing," says John Davis of Burlington Associates, a consulting firm that helps form and maintain community land trusts. "The community that lived there while times were bad could gain control over the land, so that when times were good vulnerable people were not forced aside. This is a model that proved itself to be remarkably effective in preserving the affordability of housing during times when the market was hot ... a bulwark against gentrification." The 1980s proved a seminal decade as the number of land trusts exploded from 12 to 120. Some thrived, like Dudley Neighbors Incorporated, but many urban land trusts didn't make it to the end of the next decade, and a few even failed spectacularly. Philadelphia's Manos Unidas managed to obtain properties, but secured only a few badly damaged units. The mostly volunteer staff didn't have the sophistication to maintain the trust and the organization fell apart. The people in the houses, meanwhile, were poorly informed about the technicalities and didn't realize that, with the land trust defunct, they now had to pay taxes on the land and the house. Several of their properties nearly went into foreclosure, and were only saved after excruciating political and community effort. The North Camden Community Land Trust, across the river from Philadelphia, collapsed in 2007 because local banks would not allow it to refinance its loans after the Great Recession. But the new century has mostly been kinder to the community land trust model. After a period of stagnation in the 1990s, a 2011 survey found 242 community land trusts. Today there are more than 280. Interest is growing. "Community land trusts seem to come up with a very pleasant glow around [them] at almost every housing conference or ideas forum that I attend," says Lawrence Vale, professor of urban design and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of "From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors." Almost three decades after its founding, Dudley Neighbors Incorporated is one of the most frequently cited examples of a successful community land trust. But it was created before the current wave of gentrification in select American cities, in an entirely different historical moment in Boston, when the main threat facing Roxbury and Dorchester was not displacement but divestment. In some ways, the Dudley experience is instructive, yet in others, it illustrates the challenge of bringing a trust to scale in 2015.