BOSTON NEIGHBORHOOD COMMUNITY LAND TRUST
The Boston Neighborhood Community Land Trust (BNCLT) describes themselves as “community activists, supporters and residents of the CLT who are committed to breaking down racial inequities and housing injustice by putting affordable housing into the hands and control of the community”–and this is borne out in the projects they take on as a nonprofit, working to keep rental homes affordable in the long-term and ensuring that people can stay in their own neighborhoods.
BNCLT is the newest entrant into the Ujima Good Business Alliance. Ujima’s communications team recently got in touch with Meredith Levy, Executive Director at BNCLT, to get a sense of the land-based work they are committed to and how they approach housing and collective governance.
Ujima: Hi Meredith, thank you for taking some time to chat with us. How would you describe the Boston Neighborhood Community Land Trust and what it does? What does ‘community control’ mean to BNCLT?
Meredith Levy: For Community Land Trusts in general, the idea is to think of different ownership models [for housing]. Most importantly, the idea is to keep housing permanently affordable to our communities, to take housing off of the speculative market.
We're trying to keep homes for people and for the whole community. That's the premise–and it doesn't have to be just [traditional] home ownership, as there's a lot of ways to think about community control. So our organization actually has, to date, just done work with buildings that are comprised of rentals–we were founded as a land trust [originally named COHIF, or Coalition for Occupied Homes in Foreclosure] to prevent renters from being removed their homes after the 2008 foreclosure crisis [where renters were forced from buildings whose owners could no longer afford to pay for them].
We work closely with City Life/Vida Urbana, who does a lot of eviction prevention work; at a certain point, they will decide to pass a project into the hands of the land trust [to ensure that folks will not be evicted and will be able to age in place long term]. At that point, we try to purchase buildings for inclusion in our trust, and it's not easy: each one that we buy usually comes with a long, hard-fought process of tenant organizing. Those tenants and tenant organizers in those buildings understand power and they understand their role as strong leaders. They join our community as strong leaders, which is awesome because they bring so much depth in leadership and understanding of the model to the whole community; and even in this renting model, our governance model ensures resident control.
In the future, our aspiration is to think about rent-to-own models–for those residents who do want to build ownership, we hope someday to transform their role to slowly build up equity so they have partial or full ownership over time.
How do you bring Boston’s communities into the trust’s governance and decision-making?
Our governance model is a pretty typical community land trust structure: on our board, a third of our board members live on our properties, a third live nearby in shared neighborhoods, and the final third are other folks who bring various resources in solidarity and alignment with the organization. So two thirds of our board are automatically immediate stakeholders who represent communities to whom they belong–and these are the decision makers for our organization. They govern the entity that owns the properties in our trust, and they're the controlling voice. This is also just describing our core governance; but it’s not just the board that makes decisions here, and we are constantly looking for ways our residents can take on roles and be part of our decisions. We’re trying to be more participatory in that way.
What is the relationship between BNCLT and Ujima? Where did it start, and what are some shared points of alignment in vision or in outcomes?
COHIF, our predecessor organization, first came into relationship with Ujima really early on–that relationship has existed for longer than I’ve been here. But in my time with BNCLT, Ujima has been very open-armed and welcoming, and I was personally connected to Ujima before joining as well. More recently, Nia has been helping us think about financial models: we're trying to wean our dependency on the banking system and conventional lenders, who we currently rely on in our capital stack when we buy properties. These lenders charge high interest rates, which make it difficult to keep rents affordable and to cap year-over-year rent increases; so we're looking for other approaches. We're building out a permanent loan product to build a capital stack for purchasing buildings, which would hopefully source investment money from mission-aligned investors in the community at lower rates–we will need to take out a loan no matter what, but we would like the interest payments to go back into the community, and this might also include a way for non-accredited, everyday investors to participate.
Our math shows that if we're able to build this out and we get 10-year permanent loans at lower interest rates, we could save a million dollars for a 17-unit property. That's huge savings, which will protect rent levels and deep affordability, and it will mean more money to spend on ‘capital improvements’: repairs, because we want people to live in good quality buildings. That's what we're working on right now, and that's one point of intersection that we've started to build out over the last two years with Ujima.
This all makes a ton of sense, and this technical support aspect is really cool to hear about.
Right. It's great to have you guys as a thought partner in all of this.
Why did BNCLT join the Good Business Alliance as a not-for-profit? And how do you hope to gain from, and support, the Alliance?
We are sort of an anomaly in the alliance, because we aren’t a business; [ed note: The UGBA has 4 other non-profits in its membership] but, we do contract with vendors when we rehabilitate properties, and we work with a property management company–so we’re hiring all the time, and we are an employer that is committed to the priorities of local BIPOC workers. So it's great to be part of this network; it's helpful to be among peers who share these priorities and it keeps us accountable to them while also lending us support. The exchange of information and ideas is powerful and reinforcing.
As a concrete example of why being in the alliance has been helpful: we've got a homeownership project we're working on in partnership with Co.Everything, and we started our conversations in the context of the alliance by asking each other ‘how can we connect investment with our real estate?’
We have so many projects where we work with partners, too; I would love to think about which businesses in the alliance we can continue to work with. I'm excited about that.
What’s next for the Boston Neighborhood Community Land Trust?
There are a few things. We have a vacant lot, a city space, that we activate in the summer for neighborhood-focused events; and we’re likely going to have a picnic in Franklin Park at some point this summer. On the organizational side of things, we'll have our annual meeting in the fall, and we’ll have an open house/opening for the retrofit project we just did. ✦
Meredith Levy: For Community Land Trusts in general, the idea is to think of different ownership models [for housing]. Most importantly, the idea is to keep housing permanently affordable to our communities, to take housing off of the speculative market.
We're trying to keep homes for people and for the whole community. That's the premise–and it doesn't have to be just [traditional] home ownership, as there's a lot of ways to think about community control. So our organization actually has, to date, just done work with buildings that are comprised of rentals–we were founded as a land trust [originally named COHIF, or Coalition for Occupied Homes in Foreclosure] to prevent renters from being removed their homes after the 2008 foreclosure crisis [where renters were forced from buildings whose owners could no longer afford to pay for them].
We work closely with City Life/Vida Urbana, who does a lot of eviction prevention work; at a certain point, they will decide to pass a project into the hands of the land trust [to ensure that folks will not be evicted and will be able to age in place long term]. At that point, we try to purchase buildings for inclusion in our trust, and it's not easy: each one that we buy usually comes with a long, hard-fought process of tenant organizing. Those tenants and tenant organizers in those buildings understand power and they understand their role as strong leaders. They join our community as strong leaders, which is awesome because they bring so much depth in leadership and understanding of the model to the whole community; and even in this renting model, our governance model ensures resident control.
In the future, our aspiration is to think about rent-to-own models–for those residents who do want to build ownership, we hope someday to transform their role to slowly build up equity so they have partial or full ownership over time.
How do you bring Boston’s communities into the trust’s governance and decision-making?
Our governance model is a pretty typical community land trust structure: on our board, a third of our board members live on our properties, a third live nearby in shared neighborhoods, and the final third are other folks who bring various resources in solidarity and alignment with the organization. So two thirds of our board are automatically immediate stakeholders who represent communities to whom they belong–and these are the decision makers for our organization. They govern the entity that owns the properties in our trust, and they're the controlling voice. This is also just describing our core governance; but it’s not just the board that makes decisions here, and we are constantly looking for ways our residents can take on roles and be part of our decisions. We’re trying to be more participatory in that way.
What is the relationship between BNCLT and Ujima? Where did it start, and what are some shared points of alignment in vision or in outcomes?
COHIF, our predecessor organization, first came into relationship with Ujima really early on–that relationship has existed for longer than I’ve been here. But in my time with BNCLT, Ujima has been very open-armed and welcoming, and I was personally connected to Ujima before joining as well. More recently, Nia has been helping us think about financial models: we're trying to wean our dependency on the banking system and conventional lenders, who we currently rely on in our capital stack when we buy properties. These lenders charge high interest rates, which make it difficult to keep rents affordable and to cap year-over-year rent increases; so we're looking for other approaches. We're building out a permanent loan product to build a capital stack for purchasing buildings, which would hopefully source investment money from mission-aligned investors in the community at lower rates–we will need to take out a loan no matter what, but we would like the interest payments to go back into the community, and this might also include a way for non-accredited, everyday investors to participate.
Our math shows that if we're able to build this out and we get 10-year permanent loans at lower interest rates, we could save a million dollars for a 17-unit property. That's huge savings, which will protect rent levels and deep affordability, and it will mean more money to spend on ‘capital improvements’: repairs, because we want people to live in good quality buildings. That's what we're working on right now, and that's one point of intersection that we've started to build out over the last two years with Ujima.
This all makes a ton of sense, and this technical support aspect is really cool to hear about.
Right. It's great to have you guys as a thought partner in all of this.
Why did BNCLT join the Good Business Alliance as a not-for-profit? And how do you hope to gain from, and support, the Alliance?
We are sort of an anomaly in the alliance, because we aren’t a business; [ed note: The UGBA has 4 other non-profits in its membership] but, we do contract with vendors when we rehabilitate properties, and we work with a property management company–so we’re hiring all the time, and we are an employer that is committed to the priorities of local BIPOC workers. So it's great to be part of this network; it's helpful to be among peers who share these priorities and it keeps us accountable to them while also lending us support. The exchange of information and ideas is powerful and reinforcing.
As a concrete example of why being in the alliance has been helpful: we've got a homeownership project we're working on in partnership with Co.Everything, and we started our conversations in the context of the alliance by asking each other ‘how can we connect investment with our real estate?’
We have so many projects where we work with partners, too; I would love to think about which businesses in the alliance we can continue to work with. I'm excited about that.
What’s next for the Boston Neighborhood Community Land Trust?
There are a few things. We have a vacant lot, a city space, that we activate in the summer for neighborhood-focused events; and we’re likely going to have a picnic in Franklin Park at some point this summer. On the organizational side of things, we'll have our annual meeting in the fall, and we’ll have an open house/opening for the retrofit project we just did. ✦