Community land trusts make strides toward long-term affordable housing in Detroit

Five neighborhood organizations are making progress on permanently preserving affordable housing in neighborhoods across Detroit. All five are looking to create community land trusts (CLTs) with the help of the Detroit Justice Center (DJC), although those organizations’ plans are contingent upon city approval of a new model for managing land rights.

A report from the center estimates around 83,600 households can’t afford market-rate housing without spending more than 30% of their income on rent, as of 2022. Even with the 37,000 existing and planned affordable units in the city, more than 46,000 are still needed. Affordable housing advocates are looking to unconventional models like community land trusts to help close the gap.

Community land trusts are nonprofit corporations that purchase and develop land to promote affordability. Their models vary, as do their track records . The five groups DJC is currently working with plan to maintain ownership of the land, leasing it to residents for around $50-$100 per month. These groups would then rent or sell homes on the land at well below market rate. Those who buy a home would have a restriction in their land lease limiting the profit they could make if they sold the house, in order to maintain affordability. Advocates believe that if they’re successful and can scale up the model, it could stabilize neighborhoods and make homeownership more accessible.

“I define ‘gentrification’ as community development for people other than those currently living in the community,” said Eric Williams, managing director of the Economic Equity Practice at the Detroit Justice Center. “CLTs don’t permit that.”

The center is supporting five organizations looking to establish community land trusts in their neighborhoods: the Detroit Cultivator Community Land Trust in the North End, Dream of Detroit in Dexter-Linwood, the North Corktown Neighborhood Association , Common Grounds CLT in Islandview and the Greater Villages area, and The Avalon Village in the city of Highland Park. DJC, a nonprofit law firm focused on economic equity, is a paid consultant to these organizations. It helps the organizations gain legal and financial insight, create development plans, find contractors and identify funding.

DJC Staff Attorney Mark Bennett said each of the five organizations plans to purchase 10 to 20 parcels in their respective neighborhoods from the Detroit Land Bank Authority, with aspirations to double that in years to come. The North Corktown Neighborhood Association’s land trust is the furthest along, having closed on nine land bank parcels at the end of June. Bennett said community development financial institutions and philanthropic entities like the Ford Family Foundation and Henry Ford Health will help fund these trusts.

Rob Linn, director of planning and analysis for the Land Bank, recently hosted a roundtable with Bennett and neighborhood organizers. He said the Land Bank will likely need to develop policies to better support land trusts in Detroit in the long term, such as facilitating option agreements so that community land trust organizers can slowly buy up a pool of properties at an agreed-upon price as they develop an area.

“The Land Bank really wants to see diverse, thriving, attractive neighborhoods, and I think CLTs can really play a part in that,” Linn said. “We’re eager to see how we can best support them.”

The effort has been years in the making. Williams said DJC began conducting dozens of information and listening sessions in 2018 in response to interest from its community partners. He said many of the organizations currently pursuing land trusts were introduced to the idea through that process.

Work ahead to align aspirations, policy

Bennett said those efforts “really accelerated” when Williams hired him about a year ago to broker conversations with Detroit’s Office of the Assessor that would make it possible to separate the land rights from rights to vertical improvements (i.e. structures) on land trust properties. Stephanie Davis, communications manager for the city’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer, said the assessor’s office is currently waiting for its first request to split property rights in this fashion, after which it will review the request with the Law Department. Bennett said the first such request is likely to come from Dream of Detroit.

Bennett emphasized that Detroit Justice Center is only working with community organizations that already expressed an interest in CLTs.

“We haven’t created something special around this,” he said. “It’s just the movement taking hold in Detroit.”

Dream of Detroit Executive Director Mark Crain said DJC has been “essential” to the “long journey” of realizing his organization’s aspirations. Dream of Detroit established a community land trust on paper in September 2021, but the entity does not own any property yet, due to the inability to split land rights from vertical rights. Despite that, Dream of Detroit’s land trust is planning to purchase eight parcels from the Land Bank. Crain estimates the trust will own 30 parcels within a year after Dream of Detroit transfers properties it currently owns to the CLT.

Crain said he and his colleagues initially “were not very much sold” on a CLT as the best strategy for their neighborhood because the model seemed to be used in more rapidly gentrifying cities like Boston . But they changed their minds as they saw development spreading north up the Lodge Freeway and from the west in Nardin Park and Russell Woods.

“We decided that this is a model that we should use to try to lock in affordability now while we still have the chance to ensure that this is a mixed-income neighborhood in the future,” Crain said.

Demetrius Stinson, who has lived in Dexter-Linwood for three years, said he thinks a CLT will have a “great impact” on the neighborhood. Stinson, a former real estate agent and current district business liaison for the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., said he moved to the area because he saw it as “a pretty untapped market.” He thinks a land trust will create needed sustainability for Dexter-Linwood residents as developers move in.

“I just want to make sure that as the area grows and the gentrification comes, nobody is being displaced,” he said.

Crain says he thinks community land trusts “have a potential to be a really important part of an overall attainable housing strategy for Detroit.” Bennett agrees. DJC is currently acting in an advisory role to a nascent land trust project mandated as part of the community benefits agreement for the Future of Health development in New Center, being built by the Detroit Pistons, Henry Ford Health and Michigan State University. Bennett hopes even more local organizations will see successful community land trusts in the city and adopt the model themselves.

“The status quo isn’t working well. The (affordability) problem is getting worse,” Bennett said. “I think (the community land trust model) really checks a lot of boxes that makes sense for a city like Detroit.”

Community land trusts make strides toward long-term affordable housing in Detroit · Outlier Media