This article is part of the Under the Lens series
Innovations in Community Ownership
I am not usually a big cheerleader for innovation. While I appreciate the cleverness and creativity that people manifest in the face of challenges, I have long been of the camp that believes that our problems are typically much more about political will, commitment, funding, enforcement, and long-term consistency than they are about not yet knowing what needs doing or how to do it. This is doubly true when too much focus on innovation leads to years spent on tiny pilot projects serving only a few rather than on ambitious implementation.
That said, there is a lot of value in thinking creatively and breaking out of old ways of doing things that aren’t working or aren’t working well enough. Sometimes coming at goals from a different angle or with a crucial additional tool can make a huge difference. And there’s no denying that in these disrupted political times, we are going to all have to get creative about how to take care of and protect one another, as familiar institutions, programs, and economic patterns come under fire or fall apart, and as climate change escalates.
One growing sphere where innovation has been thriving recently, in useful ways, is community ownership and control of land. Community ownership encompasses a range of structures that allow residents, tenants, or community members to collectively own and control land and buildings. The most common forms we’ve written about are community land trusts, residential co-operatives, and resident-owned manufactured housing parks.
Folks working in this space are not innovating for innovation’s sake, but making serious attempts to address longstanding challenges such as how to bring larger amounts of land into community ownership faster and compete with corporate buyers, how to keep both affordability and community control strong over time, and how to serve more and different groups of people.
I’m truly impressed and excited by the breadth and variety of community ownership initiatives we’ll be sharing with you in this series.
Some of them are different forms of community ownership beyond the familiar residential cooperatives and community land trust models, such as mixed-income neighborhood trusts, permanent real estate cooperatives, and perpetual purpose trusts.
Some feature new ways to get properties into community ownership—such as intermediaries stepping in to purchase properties quickly and turn them around to community ownership over time, land trusts cultivating homeowners whose homes have increased dramatically in value and are looking for a way to give back, and even a willingness on the part of community ownership projects to use market-rate sales and rents to finance development and anti-displacement work.
Several are serving or planning to serve specific groups of people who can’t always find a place in traditional housing programs—artists, people leaving incarceration, people who have developmental disabilities.
Throughout the series, even as we are highlighting innovation, there are also common themes that connect these efforts to our previous coverage of community ownership work: the central importance of organizing and community governance, the value of strong partners across sectors, the challenge of keeping a clear-eyed focus on the community’s goals, and the necessity of looking farther into the future than shareholder reports or election seasons encourage us to.
Shelterforce salutes the folks who are thinking creatively and then digging in to turn that creativity into stronger homes, more stable families, and healthier communities.
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4 thoughts on “More Land, More Ways, for More People: What’s New in Community Ownership”
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What a startling sentence this is “I am not usually a big cheerleader for innovation. While I appreciate the cleverness and creativity that people manifest in the face of challenges, I have long been of the camp that believes…” is this really your position on innovation? Where do you think land trusts, limited equity coops and other ideas come from?
Hi Joanne, I appreciate that that is startling, and I certainly don’t mean that new ideas are bad. My point was that innovation is often glorified as the be-all-end-all, which leaves us always chasing the next new thing, and funding a series of pilot projects instead of doing what it takes to make what we already know works actually work. I’m not opposed to innovation (as should be clear from having just curated a 6-week series celebrating innovations), but to the prioritizing of it over the other things I listed (political will, commitment, enforcement, consistency), and even worse, often a requirement to cast what we are doing as “innovative” in order to get continued support for it. I know many people who share my frustration with that state of affairs.
Here’s more of an explanation: https://shelterforce.org/2014/07/09/turns_out_innovation_is_officially_overrated/
What has stunned me in my work with non-profits seeking to deliver shared equity forms of ownership is how prevalent is the belief that success depends solely on learning and implementing the right tools, technical skills and business strategies. Because affordable housing innovations need access to equity, finance and land for the people we serve- that is, those who cannot compete in the conventional market- we absolutely need dedicated activism and advocacy to secure them and any gains thus achieved will not be sustained without constant an ongoing effort. I can safely say, without having yet read the upcoming examples that the most essential message of the series is in Miriam’s opening remarks.
The other side of the coin is this: as “community ownership” kicks via non-profits, public officials will need to make up that revenue shortfall. An expanding non-profit ownership environment becomes a liability in the eyes of public officials; the safety net will only continue to expand, leading to the necessity of raising user fees, added service costs, and property taxes. In San Antonio where I live, this scenario is looming. “Community ownership” is only one phase and component of a greater cost-revenue paradigm. We must see the whole picture in the context of understanding the financial viability of an economic ecosystem to allow for fiscal sustainability.