Penn Loh for YES Magazine
Tony Hernandez remembers playing as a child on the vacant lots in the Dudley Street neighborhood of Boston. In the 1980s, white flight and disinvestment had so devastated this neighborhood that more than 20 percent of the land—1,300 lots—lay vacant. Today, Hernandez owns a home on this land, one of 225 units of permanently affordable housing. His home is surrounded by parks and gardens, a town common, community center, charter school, community greenhouse, and several urban farms. This transformation was led by residents of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, who in the late 1980s established a community land trust to take democratic ownership of the land and guide development.
A community land trust (CLT) is a nonprofit organization governed by community members that stewards land for long-term public benefit. CLTs protect land from the pressures of the real estate market, as the land is never resold. It remains part of the commons. Under private ownership, land tends to go to the highest bidder and toward uses intended to generate the greatest market return. Cities have an incentive to build up the market value of land, as they rely so heavily on property taxes to fund schools and other services. That explains why too often high-end condos are preferred by developers and cities over affordable homes or urban farms.
Though vacant land was plentiful and inexpensive in Dudley in the 1980s, residents were concerned not just about revitalization but also the city’s redevelopment plans to gentrify the area into hotels and offices serving downtown Boston. Not only did they succeed in pressuring the city to adopt the community’s plan, they also won the right to use the city’s power of eminent domain in a 60-acre core area to take blighted land from private owners and redevelop it. The Dudley land trust, then, would own the land and realize a vision of development without displacement.
Hernandez has lived on the Dudley land trust for the past 12 years with his school-age daughter. He points out that with an affordable mortgage, “I was able to complete my master’s degree in architecture and even set up a college savings account for my daughter. I felt secure, even with foreclosures happening left and right.” Indeed, a 2011 study of foreclosures on CLT housing found that only 0.46 percent of CLT owners were in foreclosure proceedings compared to 4.63 percent in the conventional market. These low rates are attributable not just to affordability but to the CLT’s role in working with both the homeowner and banks to address issues as they arise.
Although the market value of homes in Boston has skyrocketed in recent years, Hernandez says he “can’t flip the home,” as the resale price is restricted to a one-half percent increase per year, capped at 5 percent after 10 years. He explains, “The purpose is to cap it so that affordability can be extended to another family.” This continuing affordability is made possible because the land trust owns the land and leases it to the homeowner, who owns only the housing structure.
But for Hernandez, “it’s not just about investing in the property but the neighborhood.” Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and its land trust are the “bridge between the homeowner and the neighborhood. We just had a great block party a month ago, with people coming out of their homes and hanging out. It fosters a culture of neighbors actually knowing each other. Now if you see my kid doing something they shouldn’t, then you can watch out for them.”
Through its governance structure, the land trust balances the varying interests of homeowners and the broader community in the land. Hernandez serves on the Dudley land trust board along with several leaseholders, other community members, and representatives of various elected officials. Ultimately, Hernandez sees the impact of the land trust as “not just on the leaseholders, but also the folks who have market value homes and the ma-and-pa stores.”
Though housing was its first priority, Dudley Street has also pioneered the use of the land trust for community and economic development, most notably urban farming. Urban agriculture has taken off in many cities as a way to improve health and access to local produce as well as to put vacant land back into productive use. Dudley Street built a community greenhouse in 2004 on the site of an abandoned auto garage. They also lease land to the nonprofit Food Project, which runs farms as youth development enterprises.
Despite these successes and Boston’s recent legalization of commercial farming, the challenge of acquiring land still remains. According to Glynn Lloyd, co-founder of City Growers, a for-profit farming venture in Boston, “There are so many competing uses for vacant land that its market value makes it unaffordable for farmers.” City Growers currently farms four sites in Roxbury and Dorchester, two adjoining lower income neighborhoods of color that include the Dudley neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the ranks of future farmers grow. The nonprofit Urban Farming Institute of Boston (UFIB) graduated seven farmers from its training program last year, four of whom are now apprenticing with City Growers. Eight more are completing the program this year. “Amassing land for our farmers is a first priority,” says Executive Director Patricia Spence. That is why they have teamed up with several partners to develop three new farms that will be owned by the Dudley land trust. In July, ground was broken on the first of these in Roxbury, the Garrison Trotter farm, named after abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter.
Through this partnership, the city of Boston will sell off some of its 2,600 vacant lots for urban farming. Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit, will raise the capital necessary to convert the lots into farmable land. Then the Dudley land trust will take legal ownership and lease the land to the Urban Farming Institute. Harry Smith, director of the Dudley land trust, says, “We want to promote the community land trust model but don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of farming.” In turn, the farmers will get long-term access to the land. Urban Farming Institute’s Spence says, “We look to get land for 10 years because it’s such an investment in soil that you don’t want to just do it for two years.”
Whether the goal is affordability when real estate prices are high or community control over development when land is cheap, the community land trust has shown itself to be a potent tool. Across the country, communities are using this form of ownership to make collective decisions about a common good—the land. In a way the CLT is a return to more traditional and indigenous ideas about land as commons—that it cannot be owned solely for individual benefit.
The model is continuing to evolve and adapt to new situations and uses. More CLTs are being used for holistic community development, and not just housing. There are CLTs that are now serving entire regions (such as statewide CLTs in Delaware and Rhode Island) and some that have been created by cities themselves, as in Chicago and Irvine, Calif. As CLTs diversify, each community will need to figure out how best to use this tool. As Dudley Street’s Harry Smith says, “the land trust doesn’t exist just to acquire and manage land. It’s really about engaging community to decide together what they want on their land.”