Oakland Community Land Trust is a model to create affordable housing while also centering community voice.
Problems and Purpose
Oak CLT is a community land trust (CLT) based in Oakland, CA and was founded in the wake of the foreclosure crisis in January 2009. The land trust was formed as a result of community residents organizing to demand a different path for housing justice and urge the city to use HUD’S Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds to support community ownership over housing.[i] The land trust model is meant to address issues of housing affordability while also centering community voice, and thus was a prime tool for Oakland residents to pursue.
[i] James Yelen, “Community Land Trusts as Neighborhood Stabilization: A Case Study of Oakland and Beyond” (Master of City Planning, Department of City and Regional Planning of UC Berkeley, 2017), https://www.urbandisplacement.org/sites/default/files/images/jjy_pr_final_draft_10-2018.pdf.
Background History and Context
Oakland has long been characterized by patterns of exclusion in ownership over land and access to capital for residents of color.[i] The effects of redlining and lack of property ownership meant that neighborhoods of color in East and West Oakland were particularly vulnerable to the effects of the housing crash, and maps of foreclosures track very closely with formerly redlined properties in Oakland. Oakland was hit particularly hard by the foreclosure crisis: mortgage lenders foreclosed on 35,000 homes in the city between 2007 and 2012, and investors acquired over 42% of those properties, with 93% of investor-acquired properties in East and West Oakland.[ii] As a result of the wave of foreclosures and longstanding barriers to ownership, community residents and organizers under the local community organization, Urban Strategies Council, launched Oak CLT in order to use federal relief funds to establish greater community ownership over the land in which longtime residents have resided. The community land trust model was first recommended in Oakland by a policy report on the affordable housing crisis by the Oakland Community and Economic Development Agency.[iii]
[i] Nathan McClintock, “From Industrial Garden to Food Desert: Demarcated Devaluation in the Flatlands of Oakland, California,” in Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability (MIT Press, 2011), 99.
[ii] Robert Ogilvie, “What East Oakland Can Teach Us About Displacement,” The Urbanist, no. 554 (January 11, 2017), https://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2017-01-11/what-east-oakland-can-teach-us-about-displacement.
[iii] “Case Study: Oakland Community Land Trust - Oakland, California,” Adaptation Clearinghouse, July 26, 2020, https://www.adaptationclearinghouse.org/resources/case-study-oakland-community-land-trust-oakland-california.html.
Organizing, Supporting, and Funding Entities
Roughly one in fourteen properties in Oakland were foreclosed on between 2007 and 2011, with the vast majority concentrated in the flatlands. HUD’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) was meant to ameliorate the effects of that crisis and stem the tide of foreclosures. In the first round of funding, Oakland received $8 million and after significant pressure and organizing from community members, agreed to a plan for a $5 million loan to Oak CLT for the land trust to acquire and rehabilitate 200 properties in the hardest hit neighborhoods in Oakland.[i]
Currently, Oak CLT’s main funding sources include city grants/loans and local philanthropies, and they have also purchased tax-delinquent lands from the surrounding Alameda County to build affordable housing on.[ii] Additionally, in 2019 the Oakland City Council passed a budget with $12 million allocated to the new Preservation of Affordable Housing Fund for community land trusts and limited-equity housing cooperatives.[iii]
[i] James Yelen, “The Foreclosure Crisis in Oakland, CA: Before and After (Observations from the American Community Survey),” December 13, 2016, https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jyelen/2016/12/13/the-foreclosure-crisis-in-oakland-before-and-after/.
[ii] “Case Study: Oakland Community Land Trust - Oakland, California,” Adaptation Clearinghouse.
[iii] “New $12M Municipal Fund for Resident-Led CLT Housing Preservation Projects,” Press Release, Oak CLT, June 25, 2019, https://oakclt.org/new-12m-muncipal-fund-for-resident-led-clt-housing-preservation-projects/.
Participant Recruitment and Selection
The land trust has purchased and preserved around 50 units of property across the flatlands, many of them being permanently affordable single family homes. Given that the CLT’s purpose is to provide affordable homeownership to vulnerable residents, their properties are primarily reserved for families earning incomes up to 80% of the area median income.[i] The land trust is distinct from traditional public housing so applicants do not go through federal or state public housing agencies. However, homes that fall under the CLT are publicized by agencies such as the Oakland Planning and Development Corporation. Whereas previously the land trust was focused on rehabilitating distressed or foreclosed housing for traditional single-family ownership, as conditions changed in Oakland, resident and community needs shifted and the organization started to rethink their purpose to be a tool across all community needs and thus started planning around how to best support renters at increasing risk of displacement. There is an additional element of participation and community voice through the property acquisition process in which residents of different buildings self-organize and then approach Oak CLT for support in the process to convert the building to community ownership.[ii]
[i] “Case Study: Oakland Community Land Trust - Oakland, California,” Adaptation Clearinghouse.
[ii] Steve King, Interview about Oak CLT, Phone call, November 5, 2020.
Methods and Tools Used
A community land trust is a model that allows for more affordable and widespread homeownership on land that is commonly owned by a nonprofit that then allows residents to purchase 99 year ground leases of the property. The land trust restricts the amount of appreciation allowed on the properties under the trust, preventing the land from being subject to a bubble and has been shown to insulate neighborhoods from extreme ups and downs. CLTs are typically democratically governed and many, including Oak CLT, follow a tripartite governing structure in which a third of the Board is set aside for residents/participants of the CLT, another third is for general residents in the neighborhoods it operates in, and the final third is for a mix of community-based and other mission-aligned organizations. [i]
[i] Dwyer Lee Allen, “Mapping Impact : An Analysis of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative Land Trust” (Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015).
What Went On: Process, Interaction, and Participation
At its inception, although the land trust was supposed to acquire 200 properties, they were only able to purchase 17 properties in their initial stage due to competition they faced with speculators and limitations baked into the federal funding.[i] Despite nominal support from the city to purchase identified tracts, the reality was that they were still competing with speculators and Oak CLT’s offers to banks holding the real estate owned properties were repeatedly rejected in favor of investors making all-cash offers. Additionally, the original NSP funding required the maximum offer made to be within 99% of appraised value, another significant barrier to competitiveness, which meant that the land trust was only able to purchase the most distressed and unattractive properties.[ii]
[i] Yelen, “The Foreclosure Crisis in Oakland, CA: Before and After.”
[ii] Yelen, “Community Land Trusts as Neighborhood Stabilization: A Case Study of Oakland and Beyond.”
Influence, Outcomes, and Effects
The CLT model has had demonstrated success in insulating residents from the extremes of housing market fluctuations. For example, Dudley Neighborhoods Incorporated is the land trust that anchors the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston, MA,[i] and an analysis of the CLT found that it led to lower foreclosure and vacancy rates during the Great Recession and boosted homeownership rates overall, creating stability at the neighborhood and family level.[ii]
The CLT model in Oakland has also had significant success in building homeownership and community land ownership. An independent analysis of Oakland’s foreclosure and home ownership data found that NSP target areas, especially within East Oakland, actually saw a steeper decline in ownership rates relative to the citywide average. Further examining the data on NSP-funded properties, the analysis found that 99 of the 171 properties that were not purchased by Oak CLT were classified as having absentee landlords, many of which are still absentee- rather than resident-owned as of today.[iii] Oak CLT’s model for affordable housing is also significantly more efficacious compared to traditional affordable housing developments. For example, while it costs around $600,000 to build a new affordable unit in Oakland, Oak CLT’s preservation costs in East Oakland have averaged around $250,000 per unit.[iv]
[i] Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, https://www.dsni.org. See Participedia entry https://participedia.net/organization/308.
[ii] Lee Allen, “Mapping Impact : An Analysis of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative Land Trust.”
[iii] Yelen, “The Foreclosure Crisis in Oakland, CA: Before and After.”
[iv] “New $12M Municipal Fund for Resident-Led CLT Housing Preservation Projects.”
Analysis and Lessons Learned
Oak CLT has not faced significant backlash from wealthier residents themselves, most likely due to the distressed housing conditions in East Oakland and the fact that much of the property under the CLT is property that was previously perceived as undesirable by wealthier and white residents. However, the organization has had an inconsistent relationship with the city of Oakland. For example, despite original stipulations in the first grant, the city did not give the sale proceeds back to the land, which hurt the long-term prospects of the CLT as they were unable to use those sale proceeds to continue funding future projects. Additionally, Oakland has been hesitant to invest in projects that bring in less revenue due to the trickle-down belief that they should aim to increase city revenue by incentivizing large development projects to raise property values and therefore taxes.[i]
There is a richly documented history of local governments taking explicit and implicit steps to block property ownership and political power for Black residents, both in Oakland and many other cities in the US, but community land trusts provide a way to repair those harms and rebuild equity for residents of color. Moreover, there is a firm commitment to ensure that decision-making power is shared among community residents in CLTs, many of which are low-income residents of color, and that democratic has been critical to community buy-in and empowerment.
[i] King, Interview about Oak CLT.
See Also
Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative on Participedia.
References
James Yelen, “Community Land Trusts as Neighborhood Stabilization: A Case Study of Oakland and Beyond” (Master of City Planning, Department of City and Regional Planning of UC Berkeley, 2017), https://www.urbandisplacement.org/sites/default/files/images/jjy_pr_final_draft_10-2018.pdf.
Nathan McClintock, “From Industrial Garden to Food Desert: Demarcated Devaluation in the Flatlands of Oakland, California,” in Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability (MIT Press, 2011), 99.
Robert Ogilvie, “What East Oakland Can Teach Us About Displacement,” The Urbanist, no. 554 (January 11, 2017), https://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2017-01-11/what-east-oakland-can-teach-us-about-displacement.
“Case Study: Oakland Community Land Trust - Oakland, California,” Adaptation Clearinghouse, July 26, 2020, https://www.adaptationclearinghouse.org/resources/case-study-oakland-community-land-trust-oakland-california.html.
James Yelen, “The Foreclosure Crisis in Oakland, CA: Before and After (Observations from the American Community Survey),” December 13, 2016, https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jyelen/2016/12/13/the-foreclosure-crisis-in-oakland-before-and-after/.
“New $12M Municipal Fund for Resident-Led CLT Housing Preservation Projects,” Press Release, Oak CLT, June 25, 2019, https://oakclt.org/new-12m-muncipal-fund-for-resident-led-clt-housing-preservation-projects/.
Steve King, Interview about Oak CLT, Phone call, November 5, 2020.
Dwyer Lee Allen, “Mapping Impact : An Analysis of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative Land Trust” (Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015).