The interactive map documents a 10-fold increase in community land trusts in New York City since the early '90s. (Image courtesy New Economy Project)
Three decades after the iconic Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association paved the way for community land trusts in New York City, the New Economy Project is releasing the first-ever interactive map of community land trusts across all five boroughs.
The map, created with the help of media agency F.Y. Eye, documents 19 community land trusts that are providing New York City residents with deeply affordable rental housing, creating shared equity co-ops, converting abandoned property into art centers and more.
New Economy Project has used maps as a visual tool for 25 years, but so many of these maps are about showing extraction from vulnerable communities, says executive director Deyanira Del Río.“We’ve prepared hundreds of maps showing subprime lending, foreclosures, other forms of predatory lending that are overwhelmingly concentrated in majority Black and Brown communities across the city,” Del Río says. “We’ve produced maps that show the absence of bank branches in those communities and the proliferation of check cashers, pawn shops and other high cost predatory services that fill the gap that banks leave behind. This map is one of the few maps we’ve created that show the affirmative community-driven solutions that communities around the city are putting forward.”
Each community land trust is shown with a red icon; when a user clicks one of these icons, the map displays a short description of the land trust along with demographic and socioeconomic data about its neighborhoods.
Some of these CLTs have been able to acquire land and now buildings. For example, The East Harlem/El Barrio Community Land Trust, formed in 2014, acquired its first four buildings in November 2020 for just $1 each. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, GrowHouse NYC has played a different role in protecting its community members: After establishing the BLAC Land Trust, the organization secured citywide recognition of the Flatbush African Burial Ground, preventing its sale to private developers in 2021.
Why are community land trusts growing in NYC?
Every initiative on the interactive map began with a group of people organizing against racial and socioeconomic inequality, Del Río says. Ultimately, their organizing efforts led them to pursue collective ownership through community land trusts.
CLTs are non-profit, democratically-governed organizations that acquire and steward land on behalf of community members. CLTs can offer long-term use of the lands to individual property owners through a renewable ground lease to create permanently affordable residential, commercial and community spaces. With the separation of building and land, CLTs can ensure that the building usage — apartments, a community center, etc – is rented at an affordable price rather than being treated as a commodity.
What’s behind the surge in CLTs across New York over the past two decades?
Del Río says that the creation of the New York City Community Land Initiative (NYCCLI), a coalition of grassroots organizing and social justice groups working to advance non-speculative housing and neighborhood-led development, is one of the main factors. Born from the collaborative efforts between Picture the Homeless, New Economy Project, and Manhattan Community Board 11, NYCCLI officially formed as a coalition in 2014 although their work began long before that. Since the coalition’s founding, 10 times more CLTs have hit New York City and they’re developing at a much faster rate than ever before, Del Río says.
Del Río attributes NYCCLI’s base building, constant outreach and popular education efforts to more and more organizing groups discovering CLTs as a possible way of securing stability and income for rent-burdened communities.
When the coalition started, Del Río says, the first thing they noticed was a massive information gap and lack of awareness about the impact CLTs can have on underresourced communities. They began by using Cooper Square as an example of a transformative model of a successful social housing practice. One of their popular education tools is a board game called Trustville, where players pretend to be CLT board members themselves.
Del Río also points to a hard-fought $7.5 million city council investment, which began in 2019 and has been renewed annually ever since, toward fostering CLTs.
“We want this map to show city council members who have invested just how deep the impact is. It’s a way to highlight the amazing work and scale up,” says Dey.
NYCCLI members — including many organized groups like the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition — did hundreds of hours of outreach to secure the introduction and sponsorship of many city council bills prioritizing CLTs when the city is developing public land or when a landlord sells.
Edward Garcia, organizing director at the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, says he hopes this map shows city officials that there is an ecosystem of people working hard to make these CLTs happen. “Hopefully these maps show elected officials how hard we’re working and help us get the visibility we need to secure more resources for our people,” says Garcia.
This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies, which is made possible with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This story has been corrected to clarify NYCCLI’s advocacy for CLT bills in city council.