Affordable housing is on New York City’s mind. A critical mass of civic organizations, academic institutions, city agencies, advocacy groups, and others are pondering the essential and perennial issue of how to ensure that the city becomes affordable for the extraordinarily diverse population that makes it work. What’s more, the conversation is riding a new wave of perceived political support from the de Blasio administration, which has tapped leading academics and esteemed private and public sector figures to deliver on its ambitious promise to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing in ten years. With the details of the Mayor’s plan due to be released May 1st, we will undoubtedly be hearing a great deal of commentary about policy and implementation — development sites, low-income housing tax credits, preservation, NYCHA reforms — for weeks to come.

At the same time, a decades-old strategy to maintain housing affordability is finding a groundswell of support from an increasingly diverse group of stakeholders. A community land trust (CLT) is an alternative model that separates the ownership of property from the ownership of the land on which that property is built. In effect, organized citizens remove land from the private, speculative market where its value is difficult to control. Below, housing advocate Oksana Mironova charts the origins of this approach, explaining how it has become an appealing solution to problems affecting communities across the country. In so doing, Mironova touches on the current effort underway to bring a new CLT pilot project to East Harlem as well as the adaptations that would allow a traditionally hyper-local and community-driven project to scale up to the city-wide level.

CLT promotional graphic by NYC Community Land Initiative

A combination of stagnating wages and rising rents has left more than half of New York City’s renters rent burdened. The scale of the city’s housing crisis is pushing advocates, policymakers, academics, and average New Yorkers to seek out new ways to build and preserve affordable housing. One model that is gaining traction among some of the city’s housing advocates is the community land trust (CLT). CLTs have a dual tenure structure, where the ownership of land and the ownership of property are separated. Urban CLTs frequently operate on a community-wide scale and seek to address broader issues beyond housing affordability, ranging from neighborhood stabilization to environmental sustainability. While New York City has a few existing CLTs, many challenges limit broader implementation, especially the high cost of land. The multi-faceted nature of the CLT model is nonetheless pertinent to the city’s housing crisis, a structural problem that cannot be addressed on the individual unit or building scale....Continue Reading

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