Last week Mayor Mamdani released his “Block by Block: The Housing Plan for A New Era” which aims to support, with public and private financing, the construction of 200,000 new “affordable” (a term largely undefined) homes and preservation of another 200,000 lower income and rent stabilized units over the next decade in NYC. The Plan also calls for more capital investment in NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) buildings, again drawing on public and private sources, and aggressive housing and building code enforcement by city agencies.
While there are many commendable goals outlined in this plan, at least in theory, the Mayor’s “all of the above” approach to affordability, on the one hand, promotes social housing initiatives including increased support of public housing, and, on the other hand, supports market rate housing (with subsides for some low-income units), for-profit developers (partnering with non-profits with no requirements for transparency and accountability), and privatization of public housing management, which altogether presents a confusing patchwork of a house ideologically divided. So who will win out in the end?
To answer this question and envision a path forward to benefit the low-income and working class majority in NYC, we must first recall some recent history or simply awaken to the elephant in the room lurking in plain sight, namely, the so-called “City of Yes” – previous Mayor Adam’s controversial and sweeping, multi-part zoning overhaul rewriting the zoning codes, raising building height limits, increasing density, stripping protections in historic and contextual areas including the East Village and Far West Village and fostering without restriction – the construction of luxury housing.
The City of Yes was ALREADY CODIFIED INTO LAW well before the starting gun has yet to be fired launching Mayor Mamdani’s own housing plan. Yet paradoxically the Mayor, rather than moving to rescind this destructive legislation has instead endorsed it! The City of Yes developer gravy train was set in motion in 2024 and like a comet hurtling towards earth, will now require a level of resistance unseen in our prior experience to reverse course.
Today, for example, under this very legislation, we are witnessing the construction of a 30-story tower at 5 West 13th Street comprising 36 ultra-luxury condos with no affordable units required.
Be assured that our newly empowered Frankenstein developers are busy prowling our streets block by block for new opportunities.
Another significant feature whose consequences are ignored in Mayor Mamdani’s housing plan is the impact on affordability of coop development and homeownership. The proliferation of so-called “limited equity” low-income Housing Development Fund Corporations or HDFC coops throughout the city (there are currently about 1,100 of these buildings totaling approximately 25,000 units) is a prime example of the uncontrollable nature of gentrification in the housing coop model where the city’s growing professional and managerial class purchase most apartments that become available.
Similarly, the Nehemiah Project, widely and rightly acclaimed in the 1980s for its construction of thousands of affordable homes for low-income and working class households is today largely unaffordable to these populations. Who could have predicted back then that a city with thousands of abandoned building and vacant lots would rebound so that even in impacted neighborhoods like East New York, home purchase prices would today be upwards of $400,000.
While prices like this are seemingly reasonable relative to home prices on the open market, what lower income person has access to this amount of credit and then can afford home mortgage payments along with monthly maintenance costs? For the same reason, apartments in HDFCs are today largely out of reach of low-income and working class households. (The issue of equity in which new members are responsible for paying, as part of the purchase price, the accrued equity of departing members, needs to be examined in order to understand the irrational nature of our pricing system which serves to punish the young and low-income households. This is a largely unexamined, yet fundamental matter I will explore in a future article).
Interestingly, our national obsession with homeownership (whether owning a house, coop or condo) didn’t simply arise from human instinct, but has been carefully cultivated by the ruling class beginning in the Great Depression of the 1930s, to derail the social movements of that era who were demanding public housing/housing as a human right and socialism. During that period of revolutionary turmoil in US history, the FDR administration was only able to overcome the resistance of right-wing Republicans and southern Democrats in passing the historic Housing Act of 1937 (establishing, for the first time, local Public Housing Agencies like NYCHA) by imposing, among other restrictions, inadequate construction cost limits which are a primary source of continuing maintenance problems for NYCHA and other Housing Agencies. By repeatedly emphasizing the (manufactured) rundown condition and failure of public housing, homeownership continues to be the focus of the American Dream
So we’ve been down this road for a long time and it’s now time to forge a new path forward. Whatever new path we choose (I’ve chosen the multi-sector community land trust) must recognize that the problem of building affordable housing is not solely a problem of supply or financing but rather a problem of power as I explain in the following, Viewing this only in those terms, as the ruling class prefers, generally leads to two “solutions”: lower costs as much as possible, for example, with manufactured homes or using large scale 3D printers (will reinforced cardboard construction be next?) and induce the rich to participate in financing affordable housing by legislating to make them richer!
Two corollaries guide our journey towards a just and caring society where truly affordable housing is a human right: First, our path forward as a social housing movement that serves all those in need can be summarized as follows: (1) To build housing we need to build power. (2) To build power we need to build community. (3) Building community means addressing the needs of the whole person and engaging them in securing those needs through collective action.
Second, a path to unite all those in need will celebrate the extraordinary diversity in our communities while healing its social divisions through a deeper understanding of identity and power: While our identity is our strength, whether we are Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, whether gay, straight, bi, whether young, old, abled or differently abled, male or female, our power is everything we are and everything we do and our community or collective power is all of us joining together in the struggle for equity and justice.
The Community Land Trust
In pursuing these actions, I propose herein to offer a renewed vision of the community land trust (CLT) as a model for building community power. A CLT is typically defined as a nonprofit organization that holds land on behalf of a community to promote affordable housing and sustainable development. The CLT is a form of shared ownership or stewardship whereby land is held in perpetuity by the trust while buildings or improvements on the land are owned by individuals or other organizations. Through long-term ground leases to these other owners, the CLT ensures that any developments will remain committed to serving the needs of the broader community. The governing board of the CLT is generally composed of residents on trust land and a majority of non-resident community representatives
In recent years, CLTs have gained in popularity in New York City and around the country as housing has become increasingly unaffordable for the majority. After a long period of quiescence, it is useful to reexamine this model in light of the experiences of earlier efforts beginning in the 1980s. What we have learned is that to endure, the CLT must represent more than a sophisticated development scheme for coop housing and storefront rentals.
Earlier Sixth Street Community Center** and community partners, Cooper Square Committee and the newly formed THIS LAND IS OURS CLT, with support from our elected officials and residents of surrounding New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) developments, proposed to develop a community land trust on land to be secured from NYCHA on East 6th Street. The proposed CLT will address critical issues around food, energy and labor together with the construction of permanently affordable housing for low-income and working class people. Along with 70 units of housing – organized as a Mutual Housing Association (MHA) – a Workers Center, Food Coop, and Clean Energy Coop would also be developed. Dedicated meeting and event space for local NYCHA tenant associations in the 4,500 sq. ft. ground floor community space would be provided as well. To the extent possible, NYCHA residents living in overcrowded apartments would be given priority for available units in the MHA, and individuals and families on the NYCHA waiting list would also be given consideration.
Through this model, the CLT becomes a geopolitical foundation for building community power through this multi-sector approach.
Given the power of the financial, insurance and real estate or “FIRE” industry in New York, the challenges we face in community-building in the Lower East Side and citywide are daunting. A multi-sector community land trust would serve as an effective counterforce to this power by creating an enduring nexus for community-labor collaboration. Furthermore, bringing NYCHA residents onto the CLT and MHA boards would overcome the divisions created by conventional affordable housing development that typically separate communities politically and functionally by their myriad of different ownership, funding and subsidy structures. The CLT will instead weave together community residents from all housing types and foster a culture and structure of inclusivity.
The participation of NYCHA residents together with representatives of other sectors on the CLT and MHA boards of directors offers a new more expansive model for community organization. Critically, the development of a proposed site on East 6 Street on an underutilized NYCHA parking lot, also brings into focus the central importance of connecting the work of the CLT with the struggle to save and maintain public housing and oppose its privatization.
Control is critical
In terms of numbers of units, community land trusts represent a small part of the overall housing landscape in NYC. NYCHA, on the other hand, comprises 180,000 units housing about 1/2 million people or 1 in 16 NYC residents. While significant in numbers, a large resident body in itself, however, does not guarantee community or political power. The structure and governance of that housing together with the degree of engagement of its residents are critical factors in achieving that goal.
So how does the community land trust come into this picture?
With funds unavailable for new public housing, this innovative use of NYCHA property would further contribute to building a broader and more cohesive social movement by aligning community constructed housing and organizing space with public housing. By sharing their strengths, community and public housing can together mitigate their respective weaknesses:
– NYCHA has an unmatched 90-year history in creating and maintaining affordable housing, but residents are often powerless with no formal representation in management or elected representatives on the NYCHA board of directors.
– CLTs offer new ideas for engagement through resident and community participation on CLT boards, but too often adopt cooperative housing models unavailable to low-income and working class households, especially after the first generation when new coop members are responsible for equity payments to departing members.
While the MHA preserves a key feature of cooperative housing by providing resident participation in governance (with resident majority on the MHA board of directors), the emphasis of the MHA, unlike a coop, is not on personal equity and wealth accumulation through ownership, but rather on “social equity,” that is, maintaining affordable rents and fighting together for collective security around essential needs such as free universal health insurance and childcare, higher wages, student debt forgiveness and low-cost non-polluting energy.
Since the CLT and NYCHA will remain separate legal entities, their fundamental alignment will be on a non-bureaucratic grassroots level. Our larger goal will be to promote the multi-sector CLT as a model for available NYCHA land throughout New York City and thereby contribute to building a stronger intersectional movement for fundamental change.
Following the hostile takeover of Sixth Street Community Center, by a four-person un-elected board in April 2025, organizing for a LES CLT has come to a standstill. For further information see: www.friendsofsixthstreetcc.org
