Cheaper Together: How Neighbors Invest in Community

from YES! Magazine:



Cheaper Together: How Neighbors Invest in Community
Cooperative financing and community land trusts keep rents affordable and homeownership within reach.

by Miriam Axel-Lute, John Emmeus Davis, Harold Simon


The story of the Sawmill neighborhood, one of the oldest Latino neighborhoods in Albuquerque, is a familiar one. Sawmill was, for a long time, among the city’s most affordable places to live. But it is also within walking distance of the downtown business district and adjacent to the historic Old Town area, a major New Mexico tourist attraction. In the early 1990s, a wave of property investment swept through Sawmill, which included development of a huge retail plaza, luxury condominiums, and a hotel convention complex. Businesses appeared on residential blocks once lined with affordable, single-family houses. This economic activity caused real estate values throughout the Sawmill neighborhood to spiral upward, pushing land and housing costs beyond the reach of families who had lived there for decades.

Here’s where the story takes a different direction. Members of the Sawmill Advisory Council (SAC), a group of neighborhood residents formed 10 years earlier to stop pollution from a nearby particle board factory, decided they needed to do more than protest. They formed a nonprofit community development corporation to build affordable housing in the community. While working on its first seven homes, SAC learned that 27 acres of vacant land near the factory were going up for sale. Fearing that the factory would expand if it could acquire this parcel, SAC convinced the city to buy the land with the understanding that SAC would be consulted on any future development planned for the site.

As the city plodded through a multi-year process of rezoning the site to allow for residential and commercial development, SAC’s leaders realized that the only way to be sure that development benefited long-time, lower-income residents was for the community itself to own the land, guide its development, and control its use.

So, in 1997, they converted the Sawmill Community Development Corporation into a community land trust (CLT). After working with residents to prepare a master plan, and months of negotiations between SAC and city officials over the details of a development agreement, the city of Albuquerque eventually conveyed title to all 27 acres to the Sawmill CLT. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/making-it-home/cheaper-together-how-neighbors-invest-in-community