Land trusts a faster, cheaper way to create affordable housing
The Bay Area is facing a real estate apocalypse.
Of course, housing prices in the region have been and continue to be unaffordable for so many. Sky-high rents are leading to widespread displacement, particularly of communities of color and working-class people. While large-scale affordable housing developments are the primary focus of most housing advocates, we need to think creatively about what additional solutions there might be to keep residents housed.
Currently, most people think there is a set tool kit for how we can address our housing crisis: building more housing, increasing investment and financing available for affordable units within these projects from government and philanthropic institutions, and expanding rent control. But given land values have largely been on the rise in the Bay Area for decades, producing new affordable housing or converting existing housing into affordable housing will require an everincreasing amount of public tax dollars with every passing year.
That’s an unsustainable and dangerous cycle.
Moreover, there’s a timing issue. Increasing the supply of affordable housing is important for the long term but, in the short term, we need to stop displacement from happening.
The production of new market-rate housing relies on supply and demand to bring down the cost of housing: The logic is that as supply goes up, prices will come down. Ideally, a large enough supply of new housing will make landlords compete against each other for tenants by lowering rents. But in the short term, new buildings are always more expensive and require higher rents than old rentcontrolled buildings. Affordability then relies on higher-income households eventually leaving their less expensive but older rent-controlled apartments due to the increased supply of newer more attractive market-rate units. This would eventually open up new rent-controlled units for low-income tenants, but it might be a decade or more before the benefits of that shift make a meaningful difference.
That is more time than the people of the Bay Area have to wait. For decades, in San Francisco especially, BIPOC and working-class communities were displaced from neighborhoods like the Bayview, the Mission and Chinatown. In 1990, for example, around 11% of San Francisco’s population was Black. In 2023, the number is closer to 6%.
These Bay Area families need affordable places to rent. They also deserve the opportunity to own their own homes so they can create the generational wealth that can help ensure the ability of their families to stay here. But in the current real estate market, that is an impossible dream for most.
So what other options are there? A little-discussed avenue to address some of the most immediate impacts of our housing crisis is the community land trust — a cooperative arrangement that takes existing homes off the speculative market and places them into community ownership by creating a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that has democratic decision-making baked into its legal structure.
A trust’s board is made up of one-third residents, one-third community members and one-third technical expert members. This community ownership model creates a path for people of color and working-class families to have access to affordable housing and to own their homes through a ground lease or limited equity housing cooperative — agreements in which the land the home is built on is owned by the trust and the structure is owned by a low-income or moderateincome individual or set of individuals. By splitting the ownership of land and housing, owners can build equity and the house stays permanently affordable because the owner cannot sell it on the market. The next home buyer can buy it at an affordable price.
This is what my organization, the San Francisco Community Land Trust did with Columbus United Cooperative, a 21-unit building in Chinatown that is home to working families who are primarily people of color (the majority being Chinese American first-generation immigrants and those of Chinese descent). And most recently, our trust, with the Mayor’s Office of Housing, acquired a four-unit building on Filbert Street in Russian Hill. Now, this housing will become permanently affordable, and the residents — including seniors and lowincome people of color — will be able to stay in their homes.
Community land trusts help ensure that the future of San Francisco doesn’t just include people with access to generational wealth. And perhaps best of all, rental properties can be converted into trust-owned properties within a few months, allowing people to stay in beloved, long-term homes rather than relocate.
Changemakers like philanthropist Mackenzie Scott already see the potential of the community land trust model. In September, the San Francisco Community Land Trust announced a groundbreaking $20 million investment from Scott.
If we fail to leverage all the tools available to us to keep people housed, we run the risk of losing entire communities who have lived here for decades and make up the fabric of the city. Community land trusts transform lives and neighborhoods and are a critical part of ending our housing crisis.