Scattered site buying of houses in high cost neighborhoods doesn't seem to be a good way to develop scale for a community land trust

The Douglass Community Land Trust in DC was created to ward off gentrification in Ward 8 that was predicted to occur as a response to the creation of the 11th Street Bridge Park connecting East and West of the Anacostia River.

Personally, I don't see the bridge park as a likely high velocity augur of gentrification because it isn't located near housing, on either side of the river.

It will be a trek to get to.  I think it's cool and disclosure, I was on the Design Review Committee for its initial development, but it's a lot of money and because of locational issues, isn't likely to have the impact that is predicted.

In general, my criticism of land trusts is they need to be created long before the velocity of community change is heightened and demand has been stoked in neighborhoods once ignored, like 15 years ago at least, not 5 years ago.  And that's my criticism of cities (and DC) and housing policy more generally.

There needed to be a plan, and a lot of money to fund it, around 2000, not many years later.  Although to be fair, DC has funded a fair amount of housing through its Housing Production Trust Fund.

Anyway, the Washington Post has an article, "A ‘clerical error’ could cost D.C. 65 new units of affordable housing," that the Douglass Community Land Trust is in danger of losing a $2 million grant, because of errors on the part of the DC government.

Within the article there is an interesting subsection, about how the Trust is buying high cost houses, albeit for less than market value, West of the River, as a way to build their portfolio.  I understand the sentiment, but it seems like mission creep of massive proportions, and a poor use of scarce funds.

From the article:

To provide permanent affordable housing, the trust acquires homes at a below-market rate and sells them to households earning 80 percent or below the median family income, Executive Director Ginger Rumph said. The trust also creates affordable homes by purchasing land and leasing it to developers, establishing co-op housing and partnering with construction companies. Using these methods, Rumph said, the council’s $2 million award would have financed the creation of 65 affordable units. 

With Douglass’s mission in mind, Ed Lazere, a former D.C. Council chair candidate, and his wife went to the trust in September 2022 to sell it the Brookland home they purchased in 1992. “We wanted to pass our home to someone that was like we were — people early in their career, moderate income — rather than be a part of gentrification in Brookland,” Lazere said. 

But the city didn’t disburse the $2 million as promised in March, Rumph said, and the land trust couldn’t immediately complete the sale. “It wasn’t clear to us that [the sale] was going to happen,” Lazere said. “We were prepared to sell the house at market rate.” 

The trust ended up taking out a loan to finance the purchase, Rumph said, on top of another loan it took out to buy a property in Northwest Washington. The sellers in that case were also private citizens who agreed to a sale price well below market rate because they wanted to help preserve affordable housing. The two purchases left the trust $1.2 million in debt. 

A couple million for two houses, versus what they say, that $2 million could leverage 65 houses in Anacostia.

FWIW, the book Streets of Hope: the Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood, published in 1999, describes the creation of a community development corporation/land trust in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.  Over 30 years, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative has developed not quite 300 units of housing.  That doesn't seem like a lot to me.

Community land trusts as models for BTMFBA: Valley Floor Preservation Partners, Telluride Colorado

BTMFBA is "pathbreaking" only in that community-initiated retail ownership programs are rare, almost nonexistent in the US.  Arts-focused community development corporations aren't completely rare, but the kind of city or county wide program of space preservation that I propose through BTMFBA seems to be unheard of.

-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building," 2016
-- "The SEMAEST Vital Quartier program remains the best model for helping independent retail," 2018
-- "A wrinkle on BTMFBA: let the city/county own the cultural facility, while you operate it (San Francisco and the Fillmore Heritage Center)," 2021
-- "Saving urban corner stores needs public assistance: Mott's Market on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC," 2022 

But land trusts, focused originally on open space and farmland preservation, and more recently, on maintaining urban affordability, have been around for decades.

-- Origins and Evolution of the Community Land Trust in the United States
-- Smart Growth and Open Space Conservation, EPA
-- Farmland Preservation and Farm Transition, USDA

PBS stations are running a documentary "Forever Wild," about how citizens of Telluride, Colorado organized to preserve their "Valley Floor," formerly mining property, which had been purchased by a billionaire who intended to develop it ("PBS picks up ‘Forever Wild’ Valley Floor documentary airing in April," Telluride Daily Planet).

We watched it the other night, on the Utah state education television channel (separate from PBS).

-- Forever Wild video

Instead of agreeing to a partial preservation program, citizens agreed through a referendum to go forward, condemn the property, and purchase it for permanent preservation.  This was controversial in part because the land is outside of the city proper, located in San Miguel County, and lobbyists for the property owner successfully got legislation passed to make the condemnation illegal, retroactively.

-- Valley Floor Preservation Partners

But they managed to raise the $50 million needed to pay for the property, and eventually the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the legislation barring condemnation (eminent domain) was illegal.

Their fight, and the documentary definitely illustrate the lengths that people have to go to in order to initiate and succeed in community-related property purchases.

The city had in the 1990s passed a law putting funds towards land preservation.  So they set the stage to go forward.  

But it wasn't easy.  It is a good example of putting large scale programs in place proactively.

(I don't know how it happened, but Ann Arbor has a similar program, which to reduce the possibility of sprawl, buys land in the townships around the city, in order to preserve open space.

-- Land Preservation Programs, Washtenaw County
-- Greenbelt Program, Ann Arbor

Note that there is a documentary on the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, Boston, based on the book Streets of Hope, which was published in the early 1990s.  

-- "Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street," New Day Films

It's inspiring, although I hesitated to show it in DC, because it championed eminent domain authority for community development corporations, and DC's CDCs hadn't proven they were trustworthy enough to have that kind of power ("The community development approach and the revitalization of DC's H Street corridor: congruent or oppositional approaches?," 2013, ""Falling up -- Accountability and DC Community Development Corporations," 2005).

Surprisingly though, in 30+ years, DSNI has amassed only about 200 units of housing, which doesn't seem like all that much.

Q: Could a community land trust help solve D.C.’s gentrification crisis? A: No, not 15 years after the velocity of DC's housing market changed in earnest

Yesterday's Post has this article, "Could a community land trust help solve D.C.’s gentrification crisis?"

The answer is "no." At least, "no, not if the land trust is just now starting to get active, after the DC real estate market has been seriously appreciating since 2004."

First, a land trust isn't the only way to buy multiunit buildings. Community housing organizations can buy and hold such properties as a way to maintain permanent affordability.  (In the social/public housing world btw, "preservation" refers to keeping properties affordable, not historic preservation.)

There should have been a more concerted effort to do this starting many years ago.

Second, a land trust, focused on buying individual properties, in today's market, at least in DC, can't have much impact.

The properties are too expensive, even relatively speaking, in areas East of the River where housing prices are lower, but still not cheap.

As I mention from time to time, an urban land trust isn't a new idea. It is discussed at length in the book Streets of Hope, which was published in 1999. (There is also a companion movie, "Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street, New Day Films, which came out in 2001.)

After 2530 years, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative's land trust has 225 units, some owner-occupied, some cooperative housing, and some rental, with some of the land part of an urban farm ("Trust and transformation in a Roxbury neighborhood," Boston Globe).

More importantly, they were getting property when the neighborhood was distressed, a weak real estate market, not when it was a strong market.

And most of the properties they got for free, either from the city or by eminent domain action.

That being said, the DSNI is a great example of a community development initiative and revitalization in a weak real estate market.

By comparison, DC's "East of the River" real estate market is much higher cost, and the land trust operating there won't get much property for free.

Note too that the interest in creating the land trust wasn't just permanent affordability, it was to have underlying control of the land to be able to take control were properties to once again become distressed.

======
Urban land trusts are a program to initiate when real estate is cheap, with a revitalization plan in place, not when it is already very expensive and without an overall plan.

Carving out the Commons: book talk today at American University (and tomorrow in Baltimore)

Unbeknownst to me, independent research Amanda Huron has written a book about DC's limited equity low income housing co-ops, which is opportune given my recent writings on the topic, including "Not particularly radical: housing ideas from Right to the City."

From the book's website at the University of Minnesota:

Amanda Huron will be at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center on Wednesday, April 4 at 4:00 p.m. for a reading and signing of her new book, Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C..

Carving Out the Commons theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” in Washington, D.C., through an investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. It asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism.

"Through interviews and historical research, Amanda Huron gives us an in-depth description of the formation of a housing cooperative in Washington, D.C. in the ’70s and develops a theoretical structure enabling us to generalize this experience to other cities. It is an incisive book that speaks to a vital issue in contemporary politics and social theory."—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

"Amanda Huron illuminates new ways of thinking what social justice in the city can look like. Her writing is rigorous yet upholds the dignity of the people she studies and their attempts to stake out a right to their city. Carving Out the Commons will be a go-to both for academics and organizers in the coming years."—James Tracy, author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco's Housing Wars

She's also speaking in Baltimore tomorrow, at Red Emma's Bookstore and Café. Coincidentally, Red Emma's is a workers cooperative.

Not particularly radical: housing ideas from Right to the City

NotionsCapital calls our attention to an article  (" Radical Real Estate Ideas To Fix Our Broken Housing System") in Fast Company on the "Right to the City" manifesto on how to expand affordable housing options in the context of the hyperstrong market in many center cities.

From the article:

Permanently affordable, inclusive housing models like community land trusts (CLTs)–represent a tiny portion of the housing stock, but if it could go mainstream, they could give people the affordable options they need and the market can’t provide.

That’s the crux of a new report from the Right to the City Alliance, a nonprofit focused on creating equitable urban areas, and its Homes for All Campaign, which advocates for affordable, dignified housing for all. “Communities Over Commodities: People-Driven Alternatives To An Unjust Housing System” details four models of “decommodified housing” (in other words, housing that is a place to live, not an investment vehicle) that have proven, in other countries, to provide stability to families struggling to afford a place to live.

The four types are:

-- Limited equity cooperatives
-- Community Land Trusts
-- Tenement Syndicates
-- Mutual Aid Cooperatives.

Cooperatives.  Because I went to college in Ann Arbor, where there is a strong set of cooperatives functioning as housing for college students (Inter-Cooperative Council at Ann Arbor), some cooperative housing developments dating to the 1960s/1970s, and NASCO, a national cooperative promotion organization that was based in the Student Union but is now in Chicago, housing cooperatives don't seem particularly radical to me, especially because as a form of housing, they exist in plenty of cities.

I suppose co-housing is a kind of variant, as what is called an "intentional community." There's a co-housing development in the Takoma neighborhood of DC, which is at least 15 years old.

But cooperative housing dates to the 1920s, with housing projects initiated by Labor Unions and other groups.  New York City is well known too for its upscale cooperative buildings, where the board must approve of each new tenant before a sale can go through. 

The DC Cooperative Housing Association represents 100 market rate buildings and 15,000 units of housing.  The city also has a number of low income housing cooperatives, including 1417 N Street NW.  Some are financed by the DC Department of Housing and Community Development.

-- "A Brief History of Affordable Housing Cooperatives in the United States," Gerald Sazama University of Connecticut
-- National Association of Housing Cooperatives
-- COOPERATIVE HOUSING DEVELOPMENT TOOLBOX: A Guide for Successful Community Development, Northcounty Cooperative Foundation
-- COOPERATIVE HOUSING DEVELOPMENT TOOLBOX: A GUIDE FOR SUCCESSFUL COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT, Northcounty Cooperative Foundation
-- Developing Cooperatives: The NYC Experience, Urban Homesteading Assistance Board
-- Cooperative Housing International
-- Profiles of a Movement: Housing Co-operatives around the world

Community land trusts were discussed in the book, Streets of Hope : The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood, about the Dudley Street Neighborhood revitalization effort in the Roxbury district of Boston.  The book dates to 1994, and I read it about 15 years ago. There's also a documentary, "Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street" by New Day Films."

The Dudley Neighbors Land Trust owns the land for 95 units of permanently affordable owner occupied houses--which have restrictions requiring the sale of the property to people of a certain income level, and has 77 cooperative housing units and 53 rental units.

Note that CLTs are also used as a way to preserve open space and agricultural lands.

-- "Community Land Trusts and the Fight Against Gentrification," The Atlantic
-- Community land trusts, urban land reform, and the commons, Commons Transition

Tenement syndicates are kind of like cooperative rental buildings, and that's a bit more radical, although I think it's a stretch to think about them as being founts of democracy. If you could create a community development corporation to create such buildings, that would be a bit more radical. My understanding is that Jubilee Housing of DC does some work along these lines. They do assist people in creating cooperatives, and they have organized cooperative apartment projects for lower income residents.

Mutual aid cooperatives are sort of like Habitat for Humanity. There, people contribute effort towards building a house that they're going to buy. MACs involve owners not just in operating the housing once it's built, but in constructing it too.

Truly radical recommendations.  What would have been really radical is (1) calling on the National Cooperative Bank (2) to create a national fund and initiative (3) for construction of Limited equity cooperatives, Tenement Syndicates, and Mutual Aid Cooperatives, (4) at scale, (5) in communities where housing costs are rapidly rising, (6) by working with designated organizations in each community.

Scale is key.  For example the number of units controlled by the land trust in Roxbury is 225, which probably is not significant enough to have much impact on the housing market there, although it is extremely important to the 225 households participating in the program.  The aforementioned 1417 N Street NW building has 83 units in a single building.

(7) Also radical would be the insertion of social housing creation requirements into large scale master planning initiatives.  There is frequently a tension between "inclusionary zoning" residents and non-subsidized residents in mixed housing over monthly condo fees and other matters.  One way to limit this kind of tension is to create buildings that are 100% affordable, which remain so.

A different kind of "radical action" would be to change master planning of large scale tracts so that rather than rely on and expect all the development to be by traditional for profit developers, set up the program so that some parcels are automatically provided to social housing developers. That's what's done in cities like Helsinki. Here the concept could be expanded to include cooperatives.

The HafenCity development in Hamburg, which is led by a corporation owned by the city government, in addition to providing "subsidized housing" comparable to what we call "inclusionary zoning," they have provided parcels for both cooperatives and what they call "joint building ventures" which are a variant of the tenement syndicate/mutual aid cooperative:

A group of households joins forces to construct a real property which they will then use themselves. They are advised by a construction supervisor. Often joint building ventures are able to realize high-quality living space at prices that are well below going market rates. The building is then divided into individually owned properties.

(8) Technical assistance and monitoring matters too.  Because as small properties, and owned by people with limited resources, problems can multiply and properties can experience significant financial problems.  Managing democratic processes in times of crisis can be very difficult.  See the 2016 blog entry, "The long term potentially negative aspects of condominium buildings as a dominant housing form in cities."

DC and missed opportunities to do social housing as part of large master plans.  By way of a similar kind of opportunity, DC has three very large redevelopment projects underway, at the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center, at the St. Elizabeths east campus, and at the Armed Forces Retirement Home.

But DC master planning processes don't include more specific guidance on providing different housing tenure arrangements nor do they call for the inclusion of such housing when creating plans.  So there aren't plans for that kind of housing at Walter Reed, and probably not at St. Elizabeths.

The AFRH is about to go into redevelopment ("Some of DC's biggest developers interested in Armed Forces Retirement Home," Washington Business Journal) and theoretically that could happen, though not without prodding from the city, which isn't inclined to think in this fashion anyway.

What community benefits are supposed to be versus what people think they are about

The Post editorialized against the proposed "Walmart" ordinance in Montgomery County last week, "Montgomery’s big-box bill sends the wrong signal to retailers," and today has another article about it, "Montgomery big-box bill is unconstitutional, county attorney says," where the County Counsel argues the bill is unconstitutional.

I started a blog entry about this last week, but didn't finish it. Here goes.

The proposed law in MoCo isn't unconstitutional, it's just flawed in concept and proposed execution.

I wouldn't even call it a big box bill, because it doesn't systematically focus on mitigating systematic negative economic impacts of such stores on independent retailers and commercial districts.

1. The point of community benefits agreements generally is that a developer/tenant receives monetizable benefits from density increases, zoning changes, and exceptions and variances from zoning regulations, and that the community should receive something in return for the positive changes to the economic value of the property received by the developer.

2. The point of big box review ordinances is to weigh the potential negative impact against positive impact, and ensure that the projected costs of the entry of the business are appropriately weighed in the review process, and plans and programs for mitigation provided.

-- Big-Box Ordinance and Conditional Use Permit (CUP) Tool-Kit, Midwest Environmental Advocates

-- In California, as part of environmental reviews, new developments are supposed to address issues of "urban decay" that they might cause.

From the Urban Decay Study, City of Sacramento Railyards Development Plan:

For the purpose of the assessment and consistent with the intent of the court decisions, “urban decay” is defined as the closure of retail and other stores in the surrounding area as a result of market competition and disinvestment - leaving decaying building shells in a state of sustained vacancy, long-term abandonment, repeated property damage, and/or deteriorated conditions that significantly impair the proper and safe use of the real estate. Properties in areas with higher than normal market vacancies and which have been empty and/or unused for at least three years or more are assumed to be in prolonged or sustained vacancies. An example in Sacramento would be the K-Street Mall, which has suffered urban decay – and is only now being transformed by coordinated public/private investment back to a state of economic vitality.

The point of big box ordinances is to address the potential for urban decay and mitigate it as part of the approval/disapproval process.

3. On the other hand, businesses aren't "eelemosynary" organizations--they aren't charitable.

Although there is this new kind of for profit organization called a "social benefit corporation." One is open in Takoma Park, Maryland ("Blessed Coffee in Takoma Park offers perks to community" from the Gazette). To me, there is too much effort and risk involved in creating, managing, growing, and maintaining a business to be able to sustain the effort while giving away all the profit. (It's also why member cooperatives have a difficult time staying in operation also.)

That doesn't mean you can't have a social orientation in doing your business. In fact, the underlying business/marking approach I am using for BicyclePASS is based on social change theory along with social marketing and collaborative consumption and product models. (See
"Professor Sarah Soule Explains Effective Social Movements" and "How Markets Are Made and Broken by Social Activists" from Stanford Business School Magazine.)

But, typically, wage rates and many aspects of how a business operates wouldn't be covered by the review process deriving from either one of these building regulation process.

I know that as I participate in the development of a business focused on "bicycle facilities systems integration" I don't want "the government" legislating various aspects of how we are to run our business either, as it can hamstring us.

Just as Eastern Market in DC isn't run very well based on the law that governs it, nor is the Post Office well served by being micromanaged by the U.S. Congress...

4. The proposed MoCo ordinance is flawed because it isn't construed as a law based on planning and zoning regulations based on government's "police powers" focused on maintaining the health and well being of individuals and communities so much as it is based on a belief that "businesses need to give back to the community."

Planning and zoning regulations shouldn't be about buying off community groups--giving some dribs and drabs to selected organizations (which is why various groups in DC have been bought off in favor of Walmart, because they've received charitable contributions and other benefits), it's to mitigate in a substantive manner the potential negatives generated by the entry of the business, and to monetize the value of the zoning "relief" received by the developer/tenant.

5. Communities need strong frameworks for community benefits agreements -- I've written about this in the past, "Community benefits agreements (revised)" from 2008, although in a recent conversation I had with Robin Diener of the DC Library Renaissance Project, she makes an argument that I need to write about, that community benefits processes are typically very localized, focused on the neighborhoods where the projects are being constructed, and instead should be focused on providing benefits captured by the city as a whole--and big box ordinances, as I wrote last week ("Lessons from Walmart's foray into Washington, DC").

6. The intent of the MoCo legislation is admirable, but lacks a strong basis in planning "theory" and therefore distracts from what really matters--mitigating negative impacts and ensuring a level playing field for businesses.

The process in DC is a perfect example of the failure to have strong zoning regulations, because the community "partnership" agreement negotiated with Walmart fails to provide any substantive mitigation programs and monies, even while it buys off various community groups through charitable contributions.

Midtown Exchange in Minneapolis

Midtown Exchange 003
Originally uploaded by jSHOTS.

I've written about the Midtown Exchange from time to time because part of the new retail in this adaptive reuse of an old Sears Department Store and Catalog Distribution Center is a new public market. The Ray Ray Sun Times blog writes about the project, including a discussion of the housing portion of the project.

It has both condos and rental units, and some of the condominiums are within a "land trust" structure so that the costs are low to buy--of course, this puts on ceiling on how high the price appreciates too, in terms of reaping financial rewards from homeownership--with some units available for less than $100,000.

(Flickr photo by jShots)

I'm looking forward to touring this project in October...