Picture the Homeless
A display that was part of the PTH campaign, in alliance with other groups, to get the city to experiment with community land trusts.
In the fight against gentrification and displacement, we don’t see too many big victories. But we had one this week, when the New York City department of Housing Preservation and Development announced that it will be giving $1.65 million to expand permanently-affordable housing via community land trusts (CLTs).
A CLT is a nonprofit corporation that develops and stewards affordable housing, community gardens, civic buildings, commercial spaces and other community assets on behalf of a community. CLTs balance the needs of individuals to access land and maintain security of tenure with a community’s need to maintain affordability, economic diversity and local access to essential services.
Members of Picture the Homeless have been fighting for community land trusts since 2004. We met with politicians and city agency officials, telling them this was a better way to address the housing crisis than an expensive shelter system that destabilizes communities & families. People rolled their eyes. Bureaucrats told us it was too complicated, and would never work in NYC.
We knew they were wrong. We knew that New York already had the Cooper Square Community Land Trust, and it had been housing formerly homeless folks and fending off displacement on the Lower East Side for decades. Our members got the statements from the city’s Human Resources Administration, where they saw how the city was spending two to five thousand dollars a month for them to be in deplorable shelter conditions. We knew housing was less expensive, and that community land trusts would keep the housing permanently affordable and free from speculators.
So, we organized. We talked to people; we met with stakeholders; we held trainings; we built coalitions; we helped catalyze a conversation with lots of other groups working on issues of gentrification and homelessness and displacement.
And now, the city is embracing and supporting this radical model that will allow community members to control their own neighborhoods, prevent speculation, incubate community-owned businesses, and keep housing permanently affordable to its poorest residents. And two of the groups receiving resources (the New York City Community Land Initiative and the East Harlem/El Barrio Community Land Trust) were co-founded by Picture the Homeless.
“This will help curb spiraling rent increases that tenants face every year, because CLTs won’t have rent increases every year like we see in NYC,” said PTH member Althea York. “The communities will have more control over land, and landlords won’t profit from us anymore. Picture the Homeless has been doing this work for almost 10 years. We proved community land trusts can work, and now I hope HPD and others follow in our footsteps.”
Homeless people didn’t give up hope. We continued to meet with the city, with HPD, with elected officials. Not only that, we traveled to other states to back up our findings. We learned how they were other able to keep their community land trust going, and help extremely low income people, move people out of the shelter. We saw how people were able to get back on their feet. They felt that they were someone.
We know this can work. We know shelters are not the answer. Shelters destroy families. They destroy people’s health. They exacerbate health conditions. People get broken down in the shelter system. They feel like they’re a piece of meat for someone else to profit off of.
Homeless people know that the roots of our city’s housing crisis are embedded in speculation and greed. That’s why Picture the Homeless has championed CLTs, which offer an antidote to speculation and a way of achieving the deeply affordable housing our city tells us is simply impossible to build. It’s why we co-founded NYCCLI, and organized and staffed a CLT pilot in East Harlem, to turn vision into reality.Through that process we have brought CLTs as a opportunity and a tool to various city agencies, community boards, elected officials. It has been embraced because it makes sense, because it is proven to work (in NYC and around the world), and because instinctively we all know it is a critical part of solving this city’s housing crisis. We know that the success of the model will demonstrate that homeless people are capable of leading the city out of the housing crisis.
“It’s about time HPD does something about using public land in a way that reduces homelessness,” said PTH member Scott Hutchins. “Homelessness is all about economics, and if there is public land, the last people who should get it is people trying to make a profit. New York City Community land Initiative has done the research, and we know the model can work because we studied other CLTs across the country. We think it’s the best use of city funds to end the housing crisis.”
No one can say a homeless person isn’t important. People are valuable, and this proves it. Bad things might have happened to them, but they are willing to stand their ground and do the work. Homeless people are strong. They came together and now they’re shaping city housing policy.
Arvernetta Henry is a longtime member of Picture the Homeless and a retired New York City school teacher. For years, she has been fighting alongside Picture the Homeless and other groups to organize homeless people and low-income tenants around alternatives to gentrification and displacement, like Community Land Trusts and large scale housing cooperatives.
7 thoughts on “CityViews: De Blasio Admin’s Move On Land Trusts Reflects Good Idea, Great Organizing”
Thats right, who knows better than the people. The homeless know what we want and more importantly is needed! AFFORDABLE HOUSING!!!! C.L.T.S THE BEGINNING TO A BLESSED END!!!!!!!!
But a CLT by taking land off the open market will make adjacent land more valuable depending on the area by reducing the amount of all land available for market rate uses. Think about. The city can make more money by selling city-owned properties on the open market. Now the city is in effect donating that valuable land at taxpayer expense to the CLT. In a sense NYC taxpayers are being cheated when the city gives land away instead of selling it to the highest bidder on the open market.
But they don’t sell it on the open market — they give it away anyway, for the most part.
O.K. but by giving away city land the city is losing the opportunity to sell the land for a lot more on the open market, thus cheating itself and in effect NYC taxpayers out of what could be millions.
This is a fallacy. The City cannot sell land on the open market to generate enough resources to go out on the open market and compete for land or housing.
That is reductionist reasoning, the issue is far more complex. When a city makes a park or any common area improvement on public land, is it stealing from the tax payers? No! All studies indicate that improvements which enhance the quality of life make a more vibrant and desirable place to live. The same is true for efforts which limit excessive gentrification. Urban revitalization is one thing but when it gets to the point where only a select few can afford to live it a place, the place becomes sterile and unauthentic. A mixing of people from disparate income brackets is good for the poor and for the rich; it is humanizing, This is one of the forces that has defined NYC in past and explains the exodus to Brooklyn.
The idea of community land trusts should not be limited to very low income people.
CLTs can provide community stability to a wide range of income or wealth levels that face challenges from practically unregulated neoliberal capitalism.
That is the difference of how housing policy is shaped when advocates, often paid, dominate the discourse and when residents of a community are empowered to chart their own housing future.
Here in San Francisco, we moved on this more than 15 years ago. The existing nonprofit affordable housing developers were wed to their income bands for new construction. We were concerned about displacement of existing families from rent controlled units.
The nonprofits saw public housing dollars as their private property and tried to ensure they’d get those dollars to finance the construction of new affordable housing. The problem was that new housing would be available to anyone who entered the lottery and won, no matter where they lived. As such, as a policy to mitigate displacement it was a failure.
When we suggested the City purchase existing housing buildings and allow existing residents to pay down the notes to purchase permanently affordable units, the nonprofits freaked out and objected to anyone not in their income bands participating in buying housing out from the market into limited equity.
The CLT finally got funded and has begun to expand. But that has not stopped the affordable housing developers and their associated non-housing agencies to set designs on CLT money.
Fortunately, NYC does not have an nonprofit affordable housing developer class that bogarts the political table left of center like SF does.