The City’s new housing plan, Block by Block, strongly supports community ownership. Indeed, the Deputy Mayr said, “All of the strategies and every aspect our work focus on community ownership.”  Given the high development costs of creating new housing, especially homeownership opportunities, community land trusts create a way to sustain the impacts of public investments over generations.  The city’s housing plan, therefore, offers new tools: new capital funding, programming, legislative priorities, code enforcement, and other strategies.

According to a new report by HR&A, entitled,  We Can Own New York City’s Future: Lessons from Change Capital Fund’s Community Ownership Grantees, “What makes this an urgent moment is the wave of distressed, over-leveraged rent-stabilized buildings that will change hands in the next five years.”  Cea Weaver,  Director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, estimated that there are tens of thousands of apartments in these portfolios. These troubled properties are a problem to be solved; they also add to a potential pipeline to increase stable, permanently affordable, community governed housing.  Violation-ridden portfolios of rent stabilized buildings are a focus for the new administration.

Over the past decade, the New Economy Project and members of the New York City Community Land Initiative have been organizing and planning to increase community ownership in New York City.  Believing that ownership is the power needed to combat displacement, communities have been inventorying property in their neighborhoods and conducting community-engaged planning to turn these properties into community assets in perpetuity.  The properties include these over-leveraged, neglected properties.  They include vacant lots and parking lots, city-owned property and private, housing and unused manufacturing sites.  With strong support in City Council and NYCCLI’s advocacy, it is likely that the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act, passed by City Council in December 2025 but vetoed by the outgoing Mayor, will be passed again in fall 2026, this time with the support of Mayor Mamdani. This legislation, which gives tenants the right to purchase their building, creates another potential pipeline of properties for community ownership.

At the start of our cycle, few CCF grantees owned property. Most were nascent organizations, starting with one or, even, no staff. CCF provided core support to enable the groups to hire project management staff, TA funding for critical predevelopment costs, and direct access to legal and programmatic help. CCF’s 4-year funding may have given city agencies added confidence to award properties to our grantees.

Following years of organizing, CCF’s eight grantee organizations are turning their communities’ dreams into bricks-and-mortar projects.  These include community land trusts (CLTs) such as East Harlem-El Barrio CLT, East NY CLT, Interboro CLT, Real Edgemere CLT, and Our Bronx (Bronx CLT).  These organizations are developing 17 buildings that will generate over 562 units of permanently affordable housing, most homeownership, that will remain affordable because of the deed restrictions in the community land trusts (CLTs).  In CLTs, the property is owned by the resident or a nonprofit but the land remains the property of the CLT.  The building pays ground lease fees to the land trust, which stewards the properties, making them affordable for generations.  In addition, grantees are developing five notable community facilities and economic hubs, including the iconic Kingsbridge Armory (Our Bronx), the historic Lincoln Recovery Center (South Bronx Unite), an unused space under the Bruckner Expressway (Youth Ministries for Peace & Justice), the Central Brooklyn Food Coop and food hub in a Riseboro affordable housing project, and a new community center in a vacant manufacturing building (East NY CLT).

In order to build on the momentum of this cohort of grantees, CCF seeks to help implement the recommendations of HR&A’s report, including, helping to raise the needed capital that community ownership requires.   At the forum, we heard from Emily Duma, who is leading an effort in California at the Common Counsel to establish the Community Ownership for Community Power Fund.    We also heard from Kristin Giantris, Nonprofit Finance Fund and Christine Hollenback, Justice Capital who offered inspiration for organizing capital to create increased shared equity.

Finally, our day ended with a panel about how to expand community ownership with hints at a deal being crafted in East Harlem.  Five buildings have organized and elected to be part of the East Harlem-El Barrio Community Land Trust and funders, investors, a developer, the Mayor’s office and the New Economy Project’s Loan Fund for Community Ownership are some of the partners trying to demonstrate that current market conditions can be an opportunity to move troubled housing into well-structured, healthy, safe social housing in perpetuity.

Starting in January 2027, CCF will launch a second four-year cycle to support the operations of community ownership organizations. In addition, CCF sees a role for the collaborative of banks and foundations to help cultivate the ecosystem for CLTs to thrive. This will include technical assistance to establish sustainable business models. Some of our funders have been part of early conversations about raising a capital acquisition fund, a recommendation in HR&A’s report.

The convergence of strong city support, increasing community capacity, market forces and philanthropic support creates a rare moment of opportunity to increase the composition of community-owned and social housing in New York City.  To seize the moment, capital is needed.  We must leverage both private and philanthropic capital, increase collaboration between the City and philanthropy and continue to support the operations of community land trusts.  It is a dire moment; with all these sectors working in the same direction, we can make it a historic moment, one that changes the composition of ownership in New York City.

Watch the full presentation here.