Proven land trust model finally gets City’s attention. Now what?

Proven land trust model finally gets City’s attention. Now what?
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By Pat Swann and Michele Kumi Baer of The New York Community Trust

We are not going to build ourselves out of our affordability crisis. New York City is losing affordable housing units faster than affordable homes are being produced. The key to affordability in this city resides in strategies that preserve the affordable housing we already have.

After years of advocacy by community groups, we welcome the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s (HPD) recent move to fund projects to develop or expand one great way to preserve affordable housing: community land trusts (CLTs). However, does this mean that New York City will have a larger housing preservation agenda moving forward?

Land trusts, which Americans used to create our national parks system, are a model of nonprofit land ownership wherein a board of community stakeholders governs how a parcel of land is used. For several years, The New York Community Trust has bolstered the community land trust advocacy efforts of Picture the Homeless, Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, the New Economy Project, and the NYC Community Land Initiative.

Source: New Economy Project.

Land trusts can impose sale restrictions that ensure permanent affordability for renters or homeowners on their land. In 1991, Cooper Square created a housing project using the CLT approach, and today the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association oversees one of the last bastions of affordability in the East Village. In August of 2017, HPD announced that four groups are receiving a total of $1.65 million to explore CLT models in East Harlem, the Lower East Side, central Brooklyn, and elsewhere.

But there is work to be done. The most visible part of Mayor de Blasio’s affordable housing strategy remains a development-focused re-zoning initiative that began in 2014 with the goal of up-zoning (or increasing the density of) fifteen city neighborhoods. The initiative has come under much criticism and pushback since it was announced. Advocates around the city will tell you that the Mayor’s plan caters to the speculative interests of for-profit developers and fails to truly address the affordability needs of low-income residents, who are dealing with increased gentrification and displacement.

It is worth noting that community land trusts are not just a means to rescue distressed apartment buildings, which is often the perception. Land trusts can also be used to preserve one-to-four-family properties in neighborhoods like Canarsie, making them a strategic vehicle for home ownership. In a city where the gap continues to widen between the haves and have-nots, preservation policies that enable home ownership are a crucial anti-poverty strategy.

As funders who care about affordable housing, we honor the hard work of housing policy experts around the city that has undoubtedly led to this shift in city policy. We hope this step at HPD is the beginning of a sustained commitment by the City of New York to a time-tested model for housing affordability and preservation.

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