This Week's NYT Fixes: Affordable Housing Forever🏠

Nonprofits that purchase land, build homes on it and sell them below market rate are giving low-income buyers a chance.

Kyu: So, what brought you to this issue, Michael? Why was it important for you to report on this?

Michael: I came to this issue through my r eporting on the High Line and similar infrastructure reuse projects across America. When cities and private investors fund those projects, they’re really engineering gentrification for the benefit of real estate developers. Very often, that’s happening in working-class communities of color. I think this is a serious injustice.

Community land trusts are one tool communities use to fight back. Housing prices are soaring in so many cities. There are so many people without stable housing. I think it’s politically powerful for communities to own land and remove housing from the market permanently—or truly to do whatever they determine is best to do with that land.

Kyu: What do you think is oversimplified about this issue?

Michael: Under our current system, owning land collectively is anything but simple. Getting the land itself is just one challenge. Financing community land trusts is a whole separate matter. They typically exist as nonprofits, and those organizations end up being highly dependent on external funding sources—mostly the federal government and foundations—to sustain themselves. This can make the ideal of community control very difficult to achieve since funders often have their own development priorities.

Kyu: If there was anything else you wanted the readers to know but didn’t somehow make it into the story, please share it with us!

Michael: Community land trusts are not only useful for protecting housing. They de-commodify land and give communities, not developers, power over its use. They can protect farmland. They can preserve community gardens. When I spoke to urban planner Tom Angotti, he told me a story about how, in the 90s, community gardeners in New York City defeated Mayor Giuliani and the real estate lobby and forced the city to deed community gardens to land trusts instead of selling them off for real estate development. Many of the gardeners, Angotti said, were immigrants for whom growing food "was not just a way to help pad their budget, but a way to produce the foods that they were used to that they couldn't find in the supermarket." I think that's a great example of how community land trusts can protect the way people want to live.