Community Land Trusts: Jimmying Open the Door to Home Ownership : Housing: Buying land and building or renovating dwellings on it makes leasing affordable for the poor.
In Manhattan’s gritty Alphabet City, amid bright outdoor murals and squatter tenements, Virginia Ghazarian found a 99-year lease on life.
Disabled and poor, she had little chance of making it out of the housing project where she grew up until she got a stake in her neighborhood, with the help of a grass-roots movement called Community Land Trusts.
Gentrification, soaring real estate values, land speculation and a federal retreat from housing subsidies during the 1980s has displaced millions of poor and made owning a home elusive for many people with moderate incomes.
But 120 community land trusts, or CLTs, from Maine to California are fighting back by challenging the conventional notions of land ownership.
Ghazarian, 39, who cannot working because of arthritis, hypertension and other problems, gets by on $10,000 a year. She grew up in an Alphabet City project and later lived there with her parents as an adult, contributing $125 a month to the rent.
“I wasn’t able to find decent affordable housing anywhere,” she said. “Buying? That was pretty impossible.”
Now, Ghazarian pays $405 a month and has two bedrooms on land turned over to a trust called RAIN, for Rehabilitation in Action to Improve Neighborhoods.
Absentee landlords in the Lower East Side neighborhood, named for its lettered avenues, had taken to abandoning once-grand buildings to squatters, drug dealers and speculators, and shutting long-time residents like Ghazarian out of the housing market.
She and fellow homesteaders paid dues of $50 a month for seven years while working their way through the city bureaucracy to acquire a dilapidated building. They gutted and refurbished it themselves on weekends.
Ghazarian moved in almost two years ago, and has a 99-year lease.
“It was a huge and very positive change for me,” she said. “I feel great.”
The CLT strategy, based in part on decades-old land reforms in India and Israel, was hatched in the United States in the mid-1960s but didn’t gain momentum until rents began to rise, wages began to stagnate and real estate prices soared, said Andrew Baker, media coordinator for the Institute of Community Economics.
The nonprofit institute, based in Springfield, Mass., developed the CLT model for use in the United States and acts as a funding source and clearinghouse for trusts in 23 states and the District of Columbia.
They operate in big cities and small towns, among them Dallas, Chicago, Cincinnati, San Diego, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Durham, N.C., Wichita, Kan., Ann Arbor, Mich., St. Cloud, Minn., Carthage, Mo., Silver City, N.M., and Menominee, Wis.
About half the trusts, dependent on private donations and taxpayer funds, were organized only two or three years ago and are not yet providing housing. The rest offer everything from temporary rentals for the homeless to single-family houses for people of moderate incomes.
Once the tenants move in, they help to run the trusts with other members of the community.
CLTs retain ownership of the land and offer long-term leases for the housing. By removing the cost of the land, a CLT reduces the cost of buying by as much as 25%. When down payments are needed, the trusts often work to lower them.
A leaseholder who wants to move out can use equity from the investment and any improvements made to help pay for another home. Limiting equity and retaining the first option to buy allows CLTs to keep the property in local hands and control the resale price for future leaseholders.
“The CLT protects the investment of the community, while allowing individuals to benefit from and profit from their real investments,” Baker said.
The trusts are diverse, tailored to the needs of their communities.
On the wooded coast of Maine, over a 10-year period, the Covenant Community Land Trust in Orland has built 14 single-family farmhouses, three two-family houses and five units for the elderly. It also has refurbished three buildings for use as shelters.
The trust, with funds from a variety of sources, operates a saw and shingle mill to supply itself with building materials and income and create jobs.
“It was very, very difficult because not only was there no source of capital, (but) people laughed at us,” said Lucy Poulin, one of the trust’s founders. “They said low-income people wouldn’t take care of their houses, or they were dirty--all of the typical prejudices. And it wasn’t true.”
Burlington, in Vermont’s most affluent county, has 39,000 year-round residents and 9,500 University of Vermont students, many of whom compete with families for housing.
The university’s enrollment has risen from about 7,000 in 1971, but available housing has not kept pace, said John Davis, the city’s housing director.
The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in 1980 was $318 a month; by 1989 it was $606 a month, Davis said. Land speculation also drove up the cost of buying a house. The median sale price for a house in Burlington was $57,000 in 1981. By 1989, it was $120,000, Davis said.
The city gave the Burlington Community Land Trust, incorporated in 1984, a $200,000 seed grant. In 1987, it made available a $1-million line of credit from its pension fund. That money was used as collateral to acquire some of the trust’s parcels.
The trust now owns the land under 113 dwellings, including condominiums, single-family houses, apartments, a homeless shelter, transitional housing for single women with children and a community health center, trust spokeswoman Cindy Reid said.
In Puget Sound, between mainland Washington and Canada’s Vancouver Island, the cost of housing in the lush summer and retirement communities of the San Juan Islands has skyrocketed.
Four years ago, the average price of a home on Orcas, the largest of four islands accessible by ferry, was $75,000. Now, the average is $255,000 in San Juan County, where wages--an average $13,500 a year--are among the lowest in Washington, said Peter Fisher, president of a land trust there called OPAL (Of People and Land).
“Within the decade, all of the workers will be forced off the island and there will be no community here,” he said. “Schoolteachers, firemen, shopkeepers--they’re all going.”
The trust, incorporated in 1988, is using a $375,000 grant to buy seven acres and plans to build 18 small houses on Orcas, Fisher said.
At a time when many people are shut out of the housing market, the future of land trusts teeters on the availability of funds to keep them going, said Moises Loza, executive director of the Housing Assistance Council in Washington, D.C.
The trusts won’t solve the problem alone, Loza said, but “it’s the way we have to approach this thing.”
