Community Land Trusts

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Today we will be talking about community land trusts--what they are, how they can support residents like you--as well as other state-level legislation including the TOPA (Tenants' Opportunity to Purchase Act) and Real Estate Transfer Fee.

Minnie McMahon from the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative joins Anna Callahan and Jonathan Cohn in our latest episode. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 51. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to incorruptible mass. We are here to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state that actually represents the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful commonwealth. Andtoday we are going to be talking about community land trusts with an amazing special guest.
We are going to go into things that are happening at the state level related to community land trusts as well as related statelevels. Legislation like the TOPA and real estate transfer fee. That's the tenant's opportunity to purchase.
We're also going to be talking about what happens at the city level as well as what we can do within the budget to help make these things more possible. How sort of local governments can support community land trusts? We'll be talking about creating a more favorable political and economic landscape. And then, of course, at the end, we will talk about, like, what allows us to dream about these things and what we can and can't like, what we need in order to be able to make these big dreams possible.
So I hope you will tune in, stay until the end. And we have a wonderful special guest today, Minnie McMahon. But before we introduce Minnie, I'm going to have my podcast regular introduce himself.
Jonathan, do you want to go ahead? Yeah. Jonathan Cohn. He, him, his have been active in a number of progressive issues and electoral campaigns for over a decade now in Massachusetts.
And joining from Boston, right by the Huntington Theater. And I am Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford.
Very interested, have been doing local politics for a long time across the country, but I'm actually a sitting city councilor now.Woohoo. As well as state politics, of course, with these wonderful guests and folks that we have.
And now it is my great pleasure to introduce Minnie McMahon from the Dudley street neighborhood initiative, which does a lot of work in community land trusts. And Minnie, I would love it if you would introduce yourself and your organization, and we'd love to hear a little bit about how you got into this work. All right, thanks, Anna and Jonathan, thanks for inviting me to be a guest on this show.
Happy to be here. Our pleasure. So I'm Minnie McMahon.
I use she, her pronouns. Yeah. Here at Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, we have one of the oldest community land trusts in the country, founded in the early or the late 1980s called Dudley Neighbors Incorporated, and are just happy to be part of this over 50 year community land trust movement.
When you look at the first community Land Trust, which came out of the civil rights movement, and at Dudley StreetNeighborhood Initiative, we are able to host and convene the greater Boston Community Land Trust network to help grow this model and support our peers and colleagues in this work, and I get to coordinate that space. So that's my work. And I found out about community land trust, actually, in school and graduate school.
A lot of people study DSNI, my organization, because it has a very exciting, impressive, rich, inspirational history around people organizing to kind of regain control of their neighborhood, and then, which resulted in, after some organizing campaigns, in creating something called this community Land Trust. So I was really inspired, actually, by this organization itself. That's what got me into the work.
Amazing. So for folks that don't know what a community land trust is, I'm hoping that you can give us, like, a really basic ,understandable explanation of what it is and then what effect it can have on the community. Sure.
So a basic description is that community land trusts are nonprofit organizations. They're 501 organizations, very much like many other nonprofits that own land. They can be given land.
They can buy land. They can buy it on the market, they can buy it at discounted rates. We can talk about how that all happens, but it's an organization that actually owns land.
It takes it out of the market. It commits to maintaining ownership of the land and never selling it, but instead leasing the land to any group and for any purpose that is consistent with the organization's mission. So they're public good groups, but you could have farms for profit or not for profit.
Community gardens, schools, mom and pop businesses, housing, both homeownership and rental on community land trust land. And what makes them special is that there's a very deep commitment for many of our community land trusts to community governance. So it's really a model of not just being a better landlord, but actually having community members develop the organization, set the mission for the organization, and do the work of stewarding the land for the long term.
So it's really a model that's practicing sort of. You know, it is private land ownership, which we're very familiar with in this country. A third party, a nonprofit, private entity, is owning the land, but we're really trying to practice collective governance, co ownership of that land for the public good, and decommodifying the uses on the land.
I don't know if that was a simple answer, Anna. No, that works. Your last point, I was just about to follow with a comment you already made.
It was that one of the things I really like about community land trust is the way that it decommodifies land, where so much of when it comes to, let's say, like the speculative real estate market has to deal with the highest financial value of the land itself. And community land trusts kind of change where the center of gravity and how thinking about land about, in terms of thinking about it, something that's being collectively owned and used for, kind of used to kind of benefit the people, the people who kind of live, or let's say the kindergarten, say, work, volunteer in that space, as well as viewing that as a part of a larger social mission as well. That's right.
And I think the political sort of, for lots of us, there's sort of a political and values mission which is really around people having a say and having power over our own places rather than, you know, external actors who want to exploit or invest or whatever for profit motives coming in to determine things. So that sort of perhaps less tangible power and governance role that CLT's help people play in their own communities is really big. Yeah.
And I know when I first heard about CLT's, it was really related to affordable housing. And so what was interesting to me, it kind of broke my brain for a second, was this idea that if a nonprofit buys the land, that if you sort of buy a house, it's kind of leased, but you own a house on this land. And the reason it's affordable is because, like two thirds of the price of houses around here is just the price of land.
So you could buy property on this community land trust land, own it while you live there, and then sell it for a third. You're not going to get this. It's not like the kind of investment, but it allows it to stay permanently affordable.
And so this is where the sort of promise of permanent affordability comes in. That because it's not like an investment where you're like, just sitting on this land hoping it's going to be worth 20 times as much when you sell it as when you first bought it.Like, the land price itself is not what you're buying and speculating on.
Right. That you're just there to live in a home. And so that makes it really a wonderful affordable housing mechanism.
Well, let's go on. I would love to just point us at the state level, and if you can talk a little bit about the housing bond bill and what's going on with that and let us know other state level policies that you're interacting with. Let me piggyback on that question with, let's say, what needs to exist on the state level to help encourage kind of community land trust? Have you seen them kind of grow? We've seen a number of additional communities in Massachusetts express interest.
But what are the types of programs and policies that can help those that exist and help those who are considering and howthat then intersects with the working class of Potbell. Sure. Yeah.
So it would be terrific to see a state that sees the value of stewarding our neighborhoods and communities and community assets for community use, as opposed to what can we invest in? What's the return? How can we gentrify places? How can we increase the tax base? How can we bring in wealthy developers to build luxury housing and hopefully attract wealthy other people to live in them? Which means getting rid of the poorer people because, you know, badly. That's right. Yeah.
Yeah. Needing a state that that actually is trying to serve is, you know, putting in policies in place that really serve people who live here and at all, especially at the middle and low, lower, you know, income earners. So, so two things that we're trying to move the housing bond bill, and really it could be any state vehicle that's around and appropriate, but right now it's a housing bond bill are we need state money to actually build new, affordable homeownership units.
So since the foreclosure crisis 2008, 2009, there hasn't been state money going towards first time homeownership. The State really shied away from that. There is, I think maybe since about 2019, it might be a little earlier than that.
There's a new program, the Commonwealth Builders program, that the state will subsidize construction of first time affordable home ownership, which is great. It's a way to get more people into home ownership. However, it requires that the home, the sort of affordability restrictions because they're subsidized housing units, in order to buy one, you have to become eligible.
But after 15 years, in most of the state, this is a gateway Cities program. After 15 years, those income requirements burn off.And then the idea is that the home can be sold at market value.
It's a program that's supporting first time homeownership, which is an important goal, but it actually is completely incompatible with community land trusts because it requires short term affordability, whereas community land trusts are committed to permanent affordability. So that program could coexist with programs that also support permanent affordability. So we're really would like to raise the profile of the importance of preserving, you know, we need to build new, affordable housing that will remain affordable, and we need funds to protect the existing housing and keep it affordable.
So there's, there's, we're, you know, thinking about housing. The housing crisis we're in at the state. Yes.
We need hundreds of thousands of new units. We need most of them to be affordable, and we can't build our way out of the crisis. We need to be preserving the housing that exists.
So one thing we're trying to get, the housing bond bill is just opening up some of that language around the new construction of homes. Can we actually allow some of this money to be used for new homeownership projects in which the homes will remain affordable for the long term and just release those funds to be a little more flexible? And then we're also working on funds that would help nonprofits acquire what we call naturally occurring affordable housing. Right.
Unsubsidized, unregulated, privately owned housing that is still relatively affordable. So we're working on something called the Small Property Acquisition Fund, which would help nonprofits make these acquisitions. I was just going to jump in super quick and say there was recently an opportunity in Medford to buy one of these properties that was just a naturally occurring, quite a few apartments, naturally occurring affordable housing.
And unfortunately, because we only just started our affordable housing trust fund, we were not able to find the funds or to find another nonprofit to make that purchase. It got purchased by a private developer. Now all of the tenants are being evicted.
So it's a huge problem when these opportunities happen and the city has the possibility of stepping in and really helping the residents of the city to stay in their homes. If there's no funds for it, if it can't happen, then it ends up really having these cascading issues that happen. And of course, the rents are going to go up now, and the surrounding rents can go up because those rents are going up.
Right? Right. Yeah. And we see, you know, we, into 2022, our greater Boston community Land Trust network, which had not been very policy oriented, we decided that we needed to go to the state and say, look, we need help when we're making acquisitions.
Some of our community land trusts do acquisitions. Some do new construction. Some are looking at both.
So we figured out, well, what is the help we're asking for? So we worked with partners, we worked with people in the legislature. We worked with some of the sort of intermediary, housing finance and program administrators at the state to figure out what should we be asking for? And we came up with this small properties acquisition program, which actually was passed through the 2022 economic Development bill with a million dollar pilot. So we did actually establish and got money for this new program that the state is going to pilot this year.
And the idea is that the state would give a matching soft loan to an organization that is making an acquisition like the one that you're referring to. And the local, the city or the town would be required to make a match. So the city or town needs to participate.
The state would come in with a match, and then the nonprofit, whether it's a community land trust or community development corporation or other entity, could make that purchase, and they've done it. It's a hugely, highly subsidized deal,which we're fine with. We see a role for the state in this, and we know that it's extremely expensive for people to be homeless and to be housing insecure and has really bad impacts on people's lives and certainly economic well being when you put together health risks and educational outcomes and impacts for people who are not stably housed.
So anyway, we think it's a very smart economic proposition for the state to be investing in preservation of housing. So we did pass that small properties acquisition program in 2022. We're currently trying to get it piloted at the state level, but we're just waiting for the state to kind of press go.
And meanwhile, we're trying to get that program more fully funded using a, you know, just trying to get a bonding authorization of $25 million right now through the housing bond bill. Yeah, absolutely. Can you talk a little bit about other policies that kind of interact? Tenant separate purchase, the real estate transfer fee, and other things at the state level?Yeah, so we're big into both of those.
We need. Tenant opportunity to purchase has existed in DC since 1986. There's a, in California and New York state.
Lots of different states and cities around the country are trying to get statewide TOPA or COPA, which is community opportunity to purchase, and then also local municipal bills or policies. And what it does, it gives tenants more rights, right.So it gives tenants notice when their building's up for sale.
It gives them a chance to organize and make an offer on the building so that they themselves can become the buyers. It Doesn't hurt the sellers. This is what the realist, you know, the sort of certain private interests, you know, are opposed to Topa, because anything that gives tenants rights is bad for landowners, which isn't actually true.
But TOPA, the TOPA that we're currently trying to get included in the housing bond bill, gives tenants the right to. Basically, it's a right of refusal. It's a right or a right to match an offer made by a separate party.
And the reason this is important, period. And it could interact with community land trusts, because if the tenants can't make an offer, which is highly likely, it's very hard to buy in this market we're in, they can transfer their right to buy to a qualified nonprofit. So community land trust could step in and buy on their behalf and be a good landlord, or they could work towards a rent to own sort of situation or be sort of an intermediary buyer.
So TOPA was passed, I think, two sessions ago. The governor, Governor Baker, vetoed it. And we'd really like to see TOPA finally passed this time around.
And then real estate transfer fee, I mean, that's just to say that's a separate. The small properties acquisition fund, that's a soft loan, which means it's a forgivable loan that would go towards acquisitions. That's like a state expenditure that has long term payoff.
Topa is a right. It's enabling legislation that cities and towns could opt into that gives tenants are right that they don't currently have. And then real estate transfer fee, of course, is a way to generate revenue not from the state, but from private,wealthy individuals who are doing these luxury transactions.
So. And, of course, money from the real estate transfer fee would be used for all sorts of important housing projects and programs. And we'd love to see some of that go towards community land trust.
But in any case, the three of them all really are looking at getting more resources to house to house us justly inMassachusetts. I really appreciate the way that you kind of framed kind of how you were talking about the few of those,because it kind of speaks well to, like, we often hear in housing debates about how we need every tool in the toolbox. And,like, I appreciated your framing.
And, like, these are three different programs. We all need them. They do different things.
You're not. One of them is a soft loan program. One is an additional right that we can confer onto tenants to help put their housing.
And the other one is a revenue stream, and we need all of these things and more to address it. And the way that, which noone thing solves the housing crisis. But there are a number of good tools that are proven to work that we can adopt, and adopt them at different levels to help with a crisis that is getting, like, severe across the state.
Absolutely. Yeah. And I just.
I will add, like, there's obvious, like you, like you said, jonathan, there's more, right? Like eviction ceiling, you know, mortgage prevention, counseling. The rent control energy is, like, surging. Right.
So there's so much more. But I did want to highlight those three that we've been working on. Absolutely.
So I'm going to go ahead and shift the conversation a little bit to the city level. We can always jump back to state level if something comes up. But in terms of what cities and towns can do, I mean, this is so interesting because while we sort of thought about this conversation with you as a community land trust conversation, because of your background and theorganizing that you do, it really is kind of a deeper housing conversation and almost even a deeper democracy conversation, you know, community power and community decision making conversation.
But talk to us about what cities can do, what cities need the power to be able to do. Just talk a little bit about the city council and mayor level. Sure, cities can.
I mean, every city is different. Who makes the budget and who has budgeting power? But cities can. They put their budgets together and they can put money towards housing and schools and youth jobs and parks and rec and whatever personnel,community, you know, violence response.
How are we responding to violence in our communities? Like, what are the resources for that? So cities have the power. Youknow, what they do with their budget says something about their values. And so just getting a budget line item like discretionary CLT funding would be huge to have a sort of, I think in any city or town in Boston, we did get a $2 million CLT allocation during COVID because of federal Covid relief funds, ARPA funds.
And we've been able to use that to seed a loan fund, which is actually an exciting pot of money that the community land trusts are using to make loans and offer grant money to CLT's based on more of our own values and more of a, with a, more of like a value return, like a return on investment that is actually, we're looking at good impacts in the community, not actually, you know, getting high interest rate response. So anyway, that's. That's a conversation worth having.
But we were able to see the loan fund with some public money. You know, city money can go towards technical assistance to help establish community land trusts. So there's, you know, cities anywhere.
Cities and towns could just put money aside for CLT's, for education, for technical assistance, for projects, for, you know,business. You could have do an assessment and analysis, a business review, that kind of thing. Cities can write community land trusts into their request for proposals.
They can. They can. When they're disposing of public land, they can privilege proposals that are going to keep the land permanently affordable.
They can support better community planning processes. A lot of our community land trusts within our CLT network in greater Boston area. Again, it's not just about housing units, and it's not just about the land that we own.
It's what's happening on the land next door, what's happening in our communities. We don't literally need to own all the land,but having a seat at the table. Right.
Like, and engaging in community planning processes. Chinatown clt does a lot of that work. Deadly neighbors, Inc.
And DSNI does a lot of that work. St. Kumui does.
And Chelsea does a lot of that work of the community planning stuff as well. And I'll mention another program of what, youknow, something a city can do. Boston has something called the Acquisition Opportunity Program, which is a soft loan program to help groups acquire and preserve housing for the long term.
So the chief of housing at the city of Boston has been very supportive of preservation work. Their team works really hard on it. They see the wisdom in that type of work.
And we actually modeled the small property acquisition fund at the state after this program in Boston, which has been key,but it's running out of money, and we need to make sure there's political will and enough money to keep investing in that program. What do you do about political will? I'm shaking my head. I'm shaking my head.
I think, I mean, help build this political will, right? We've got city councils, mayors, folks who, you know, maybe support these policies. What can we do to build political will at the state level? Yeah, I think. I think all of us working on the thinking about how to keep people housed, how to fight back against gentrification and displacement, which have been, are, you know, on the record many times over as being major problems right now in our communities that in, particularly in communities of color and historically, immigrant communities, in communities that have been disinvested in historically and then overinvested in.
In the wrong ways to try to extract wealth, you know, the groups that are working on sort of reclaiming our communities,these communities, we work together a lot, but I think we also have to learn how to work together, you know, better and be.And be more coordinated and lift up how housing and worker co ops and schools and jobs and healthcare, how these things, climate change, climate justice, how these are really like, of a piece and just, I don't know, get more skilled at. At winning the narrative.
Oh, go. Okay. Just one thing I wanted to kind of underscore something that you had even noted in some of our discussions before this.
And I was thinking of this when you mentioned kind of work of co ops, is that one of the great strengths of community land trust is about the way that they built that. They're building kind of community, kind of community wealth, as opposed to kind of the extractive wealth model that can often exist, that if you have a kind of building goes up and somebody lives wherever owns this building and is profiting off of it in the same way in which often the work of work of co ops is when you often have,let's say, outside investors that live nowhere near the community and aren't invested in the community long term or the one who profit. Their decision making is fundamentally, fundamentally separate from what's going on in the community.
And they don't have the community well being at their center. And then things like land trust, things like kind of work coops or other kind of new business models like that help center it to make sure that they'll have the long term well being of the community is at the core of the core of decision making models to advance it. Yeah.
And while I say I think we all need to get better at working together, I think we, like, we agree. You know what I mean? It's like no one's, it's not finger pointing. It's just like, how do we, you know, our culture, our society, our economics, like, there's a tendency to, you know, keep things in boxes and sort of differentiate between things that aren't, that, that actually are not different where.
And so being in ecosystems, being in relationships, making these connections. And, you know, there's a solidarity economy initiative, which is a bunch of groups working together on this type of thing. Homes for all, mass does a lot of collaboration with different groups.
Right. To the city groups. There's the Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Network.
There's, you know, there are spaces where we're working together, but. Yeah, and I think a part of the issue, too, thinking about political will, is it is mind change kind of work. Like, how do we teach, it's education.
Right? How do we teach about different ways of doing things, you know, different than what most of us have been taught in,like, a sort of mainstream american curriculum. Lots of people are living more like lives with more solidarity in them. Right.
With more cooperativism and collectivism. But that doesn't rise to the top. That's not what we see every day in our workplaces and that kind of thing.
So. Yeah. How do we sort of educate ourselves and each other on what's even possible? It's a question that I have.
Yeah. And I just recently went to a kid's eight year old birthday party at a co housing place. And again, cohousing is this amazing idea of a bunch of small apartments that include a ton of communal space.
So they have a giant cafeteria, they have a giant industrial kitchen, they have children's playrooms, they have a playground outside, they've got an exercise room that everyone can use and dozens of apartments all sharing and having available to them a ton of facilities. Like it's amazing what they have available to them. And which one is the bonus? Between the facilities they have and the community that they have, which one is the real reason they're together and which one is the sort of bonus is hard to say because the community, these are all people, the kids grow up together, they see each other everyday.
The parents get to talk about their parenting and their lives and have more communal spaces and ability to sort of be part of each other's lives. And I always think about the fact that especially since COVID like loneliness and isolation is an epidemic.And so these non extractive ways of being that involve community input and community decision making are also ways for people to have healthier mental spaces, not just healthier economics that doesn't just have money flooding up to the top income earners and being sucked out of the bottom income earners.
There are many ways that we all can benefit from these sort of economic, what we think of as economic changes. But Iagree with you how to raise awareness about these other ways of being that people never even think about because it is this commonly taught thing that you buy a house so that you can sell it for ten times as much. You work at a job and nobody even questions the fact that the CEO's are getting paid millions and millions of dollars and the investors are doing buybacks.
All this stuff that is like, well that's how business works. You can't question it, you can't say it's wrong. Any other thoughts about the dreams that we have of our society before we close out? Thoughts about the dreams of our site? I mean, I guess you know about community land trusts or worker co ops or whatever.
It's like, it's not that everything needs to be that, right? It's not that, oh, community land trusts are going to solve all of our problems. That's not the case. And not all land needs to be held in a certain kind of way or businesses organize a certain kind of way.
And our work, you know, we're living on something that community land trusts, I feel like we sort of have our, we're straddling, we have our feet in multiple worlds. We are working in real estate, we're working with material assets. We have to build things.
We have to buy things. We're working within this legal system. So we're very much, we're participating in the system, and weare, all of us on colonized land, and we're still like, well, what are we doing about that? Right? How are we engaging thatreality? So I think the work is very imperfect.
I think there's a long way to go, and I don't think it has to look. You know, there's not one, there's not one perfect model, but sort of troubling. The independent ownership thing I have, you don't have norm is like, I just think what we have to do, I think we have to just keep practicing more collective, cooperative ways of doing things where you're really oriented on, you know,self and, and group well being.
So, yeah, I open to ideas if people want to get together and figure out how we can be stronger at this work that we're all doing. Fantastic. Wonderful.
It's been such a pleasure. Really, really appreciate all the work that you're doing. And thank you so much for coming on the show.
Before we leave, actually, I almost forgot, you do not hear these conversations in other spaces. So if you believe that these are important conversations to have, please forward this show to your friends, forward it to your coworkers, to your parents and your children. And also, there's a link below you can donate to the show to make sure that we can get these ideas out to as many people as possible.
And on that note, thanks so much to everybody. Thanks to all of our listeners, and we really look forward to chatting with everyone all again next week. Thank you.