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10c. Now DSNI wants to begin expanding beyond the triangle, and especially around the Upham's Corner regional rail stop. But the city is not as eager to give away its vacant land these days, and neither are private owners. "What used to be privately owned parcels you could pick up for very little," says Smith. "Now it's been discovered developers are buying them for a lot more than what we can. We are trying to scramble to try and create as much capacity as possible to withstand some of the market pressures." Indeed, neighboring Somerville is facing intense development pressures and community groups have expressed interest in a land trust. But the area has already experienced dramatic increases in housing costs and resultant displacement. "This would have been a great idea to get started a few years or a few decades ago, I'm afraid," says Vale, the MIT housing professor, in reference to Somerville. Meanwhile, the nascent Chinatown Community Land Trust just lost a bidding war with a local developer over one of its first attempts at acquisition. It has yet to obtain any land. In Seattle, it took Homestead Community Land Trust 10 years to bring its first house into its portfolio and 22 years after its founding, the trust has not been able to obtain land on the cheap from the city. Though the trust was founded in 1992 to preserve affordable housing in the Central District, once Seattle's premiere African-American neighborhood, today only six of their 191 homes are located in the neighborhood because of the high cost of land there. "One of the most significant challenges of our work has been getting access to city levy funds," says Kathleen Hosfeld, executive director of the Homestead Community Land Trust, who notes that the trust serves teachers, healthcare workers and nonprofit employees, all of whom earn less than 80 percent of Seattle's relatively high area median income. Without access to the enormous reserve of vacant land that Dudley Neighbors revitalized, and with limited access to city funds — Seattle's affordable housing levy is mostly targeted toward renters, and Homestead only offers homeownership units — the organization's acquisition strategies have been scattered over a wider geographic area. Before the recession, they helped those eligible for down payment assistance acquire a home, and then remained in control of the land beneath it. After the crash, they partnered with other community development nonprofits and created a program to rehab buildings or obtain foreclosed properties and land. The result is a housing stock concentrated in already affordable areas of the city, mostly Rainier Valley and West Seattle, with other holdings scattered throughout the rest of the city. "We don't have confirmed pipeline projects, but we have four different parcels under discussion," says Hosfeld. "The deals that are in the [works] right now are off-market land deals where we are working with other organizations — a church that has land, a nonprofit that has land — that share a mission commitment to creating permanently affordable homeownership." Though Mayor Ed Murray has made affordable housing a priority and mentions community land trusts several times in his administration's sweeping affordable housing agenda, Homestead does not work directly with the Mayor's office asDSNI and its land trust did in Boston. "I'd be surprised if [Mayor Ed Murray] even knew we existed by name," says Hosfeld. Collective Autonomy The success of a community land trust hinges on both the ability to establish and maintain a strong community group that maintains persistent involvement from members and a democratic structure to ensure collective decision-making. But money, and a lot of it, is needed to buy land and recruit talent to develop that vision in a successful and productive fashion. It is arguable that the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative prospered not only because of help from the city but because Boston is home to an unusually robust philanthropic community. Dudley Street won significant investment from the Ford Foundation but also from a variety of local institutions.