First off, I have a bias because I am a huge fan of CLT's and hope to see them here soon. It's actually interesting that CLT's haven't taken off here more quickly, leaving it to St. Paul to develop a very active and successful program (the Rondo Community Land Trust).
Barbara Lickness wrote: > The way the land trusts are structured (at least as I > understand it) seems to deny people the opportunity to > accumulate much wealth through homeownership. A > non-profit owns most of the equity in the property and > the homeowner gets a little bit on their way out. For > many people, the only way they accumulate any wealth > at all is through their property values. But that's the critical and important point of a community land trust-- perpetual affordability (at least about 99 years in most cases). It's a tradeoff a family obviously makes in purchasing a land trust home, even though they can pass the home to heirs and others, so long as if anyone sells the home the CLT either purchases it back or it remains affordable. I'll wager my most treasured knick knack that most families, in an incredibly tight market or in a distressed neighborhood (or both), would take affordability and ownership anyday over wealth-building through home equity, if that was the ultimate choice. > Could we accomplish homeownership for low income > people by simply buying down mortgages? A direct one > time pay-out to bring the mortgage down to what the > family could reasonably afford. The family then owns > the home and gets to keep the wealth they accumulate > over the course of time. I am not sure what the rules > are with the Habitat for Humanity houses. If the > person who gets one of their houses sells it, do they > get to keep all the equity? Does someone out there > know? Sure, but then the buy-down amounts to a one-time subsidy that will guarantee affordability for one family just once-- a good example of this is Portland Place, the development involving Honeywell, PPL and others. While initially affordable, many of the homes are no longer affordable. CLT's offer the perpetual affordability that all programs (and I believe Habitat included) typically lack. > The cost to administer mortgage subsidies would be far > less than establishing some non-profit to own all this > land, suck out a big fee to manage it all and leave > the low income homeowners barely better off than when > they moved in. But in the best case, as in most CLT cases, the COMMUNITY owns the land, usually a member-based non-profit corporation (such as many NRP contracting groups, for instance). While I am sure some CLT's could technically charge a "management" fee, I think most do not, and the CLT typically has no involvement in managing/overseeing the actual land (that's the homeowner's job). In the end, the low-income family owns a home, which is better off then moving from one rental to another in search of a permanent home. > The other option is to buy these houses, and make them > the property of the Minneapolis Public Housing > Authority. The most critical difference is whether you want to centralize such a program outside of the community (MPHA) or keep it within the community (a land trust). Besides, you're talking mostly about additional scattered-site rental housing, not additional homeownership. > What about the low income people who don't want to own > a house? I met many of them when I was working to > stabilize the Whittier coops. They just don't want > the responsibility of owning a home. How does this > plan address more affordable rental units? Actually, a CLT is not a cookie-cutter approach and can be flexible enough to include multi-unit rental housing, co-ops, condos, etc., if that's what the community believes that it needs. Underlying it all (both figuratively and literally) is community ownership of the land. I'm excited by it, though cautious about how some communities may misuse the concept to create subtly restrictive housing options. Gregory Luce North Phillips (work) North Phillips Press is a publication of Project 504, a housing related neighborhood organization based in the Phillips neighborhood. _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
