No more foreclosures: Rochester's housing movement hits the streets

Cheers. This sounds like a great action.

I'm curious what folks think of Community Land Trusts? That's where land/homes are taken off the market and 'owned' by a nonprofit trust. The family living there pays a much lower amount monthly and they can live there indefinitely. If they resell it, there are provisions which keep it affordable but let the seller recoup something of what they put in.

Obviously, this is a partial solution to providing full communist housing. One problem is that someone has to put up the initial capital to buy the property/houses and/or build new homes. There is a land trust in my city which turned a polluted 27-acre sawmill into a pretty nice neighborhood. In that case, the city bought the land outright and the nonprofit served as the developer. In these hard times, I'm not sure the city would do it again.

It does seem like a good demand for housing groups like the one in the article. Kind of a follow-up step to a foreclosure moratorium and the Chase divestment.

That picture is brilliant :D

"Why do we need placards, when we can just use solid metal shields instead?" :bb:

Fairplay on what looks like a great rally, nice one.

Nice red & black's.

"I'm curious what folks think of Community Land Trusts?" syndicalistcat has working experiance with this. I'll email 'em.

we formed a community land trust in San Francisco to do coop conversions of existing buildings, as an anti-gentrification tactic. Started as an organizing committee of about 12 people in 2001. Did many presentations to community groups and such to gain support. Eventually we were brought in to a tenant fight in Chinatown, where the residents had been refusing to leave for seven years, fighting a proposal to demolish their building. Thru their community support they defeated the public entity that had bought the building and it was sold to the land trust. Took about six years to complete the coop conversion. Was very difficult for a variety of reasons. The tenants are working class Chinese immigrants, who mostly don't know much English. Organizing thru translation is very hard, due to potential misunderstandings. Also, the tenants had divisions between the five or six households who were the hard core and others. The building was mixed use, and the nonprofit lawyer (a famous Asian-American civil rights group) wanted to use the groundfloor, which had been a garment factory, for their offices. So that made the deal very complicated. The building is a two unit condo with the coop existing as one of the condos. At that time (2005) there was still a socialist on the city council who sponsored a measure that created a new coop conversion fund that gave us $1 million. Now the city is broke and it would be unfeasible to do that. The biggest part of the financing was $3.8 million for seismic reinforcement (it was a brick building), which comes from a federal block grant. We negotiated a deal with the tenants where each household would come up with $10,000 for their Limited Equity Coop shares. Actually the city was willing to provide a loan for this, which they might not even have to pay back. The woman frrom the city's housing department who arranged that was an ex-organizer for SEIU.

The CLT is run day to day by an elected member committee, elected at an annual assembly. It's structured so that after it has a certain number of units half the delegates are elected by the residents. The problem is, we've had a hard time getting ongoing active participation by the residents. Once they have their housing, they're not as interested, it seems. The CLT currently has two other projects it is doing. These are large Victorian houses with many bedrooms that are run as collective houses. So here the idea is to turn the building into a collectively owned house. Both houses have a multi-racial mix of residents. Our anarchist lawyer has created bylaws for what he calls a Resident Owned Nonprofit to own and manage the house. CLT would own the land and have certain responsibilities. The socialist formerly on the city council also negotiated a Community Benefits Agreement for a particular working class area he represented, which has had thousands of new, high-end apartments built there. The condo developers wanted permissions so they agreed to fork over money to a fund. The board that oversees this fund, which includes the head of the city's labor council, likes the CLT and wants us to do a project in that neighborhood. so that's a funding source outside city control.

There is fundamentally a real problem of very inadequate financial support for any form of social housing in the USA. so this greatly limits what can be done. Because we use the coop model, it provides an element of self-management, and it maintains permanent affordability on the housing, due to all the restrictions on raising the payments. In that sense it's an anti-market reform. When I was doing presentations to working class audiences, people always liked the anti-market aspect of the plan. It's also outside the state so it's more insulated from what happens when a more conservative group of politicians get in (as what happened to council housing under Thatcher). I think what could realistically be done depends on the kind of resources, being able to get the land, and this depends on the level of social struggle. In our case we were able to get some initial funding because there had been a tenant uprising in the city circa 2000 and elected a left, pro-tenant majority to city council, and we had that group of hard core tenants who wouldn't move and were insistent on owning their building.

the CLT has two half-time paid positions, an organizer and the Organizational Director. the OD is a dyed in the wool socialist woman who had been a member before we hired her. She's not an "Executive Director" because she shares control with the very hands-on volunteer member committee. But we had to be able to point to "someone who's in charge" for the city and funders. so our CLT is a bit more grassroots than many American 501c3 nonprofits.

I should explain what I mean when I say we have an "anti-market" program. When someone buys an apartment for $10,000 in the coop, if they eventually leave and sell their share, they can't sell it on the open market. They merely get back the $10,000 they put in times inflation over the period since they bought it. So they only get back the current value of the money they originally put in. No profit. With the Residen-Owned Nonprofit houses, this is even more obvious since these are zero-equity coops. No one buys any share. So the idea is to keep the effective price of the housing to the resident as low as possible, and not allow anyone to make any speculative profit. This means our program is actually more extreme in its anti-profit policy than the typical American CLT.

maybe i should explain how we arrive at a price for a coop apartment. basically it is negotiated with the tenants, based on what we need to make the project work financially and what they are willing to do. for example, i organized a 13 unit building in the Mission District, with multi-racial (black and white) working class residents. This consisted of 12 large studios and a two-bedroom cottage in the backyard. Because their average incomes were slightly higher than the Chinese building, I was able to negotiate a deal where the people in the studios would pay $15,000 for their share, and the couple living in the cottage would pay $25,000 (since they were getting a standalone house). These payments would add up to $205,000. The building was selling for about $1+ million. And I had lined up two nonprofit lenders who would provide 80 percent financing. Unfortunately this project fell thru due to the utter hostility of the landlady who refused to negotiate with us and sold the building to a local speculator/petty landlord.

sxb1831

The big thing that I think is important about the land trust model is that it is not revolutionary, or even progressive, on its own.

And the situation in San Francisco that syndicalistcat describes (eg. the socialist city councilor, history of housing struggle, etc.) sounds like something many communities the rest of the country probably don't have. Not to discount the amount of organizing done there, but it sounds like a unique climate. I know the CLT in Albuquerque relied pretty heavily on a close relationship to a City Councilor, though the organization originally came out of a community-led fight against blight. Unfortunately, their model for holding and acquiring land seems to have turned them into a developer, rather than a self-managed housing co-op.

It is only a tool that is used along with direct action and a public mass movement, otherwise it could easily be just as a corrupt model.

Nice point.