Features eight organizations advancing 18 projects across the five boroughs, creating over 800 permanently affordable housing units and community-controlled assets
NEW YORK, NY (June 22, 2026) — In East New York, tenants of a neglected apartment building voted to purchase their property and convert it into a permanently affordable cooperative. Their effort is one of 18 community ownership projects highlighted in a new report from the Change Capital Fund (CCF), a collaborative of New York City’s leading banks, foundations, intermediaries and the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. We Can Own New York City’s Future: Lessons from Change Capital Fund’s Community Ownership Grantees is a report from CCF and prepared by HR&A Advisors that looks at how local residents are organizing to form community land trusts, and other forms of community ownership that give residents control of residential buildings, development sites, and major community assets that will remain permanently affordable and community-governed.
We Can Own New York City’s Future examines eight organizations across the five boroughs that received almost $10 million total over four years for operational and technical grants from CCF starting in 2023. These organizations, many newly formed, are advancing community ownership models such as community land trusts and limited-equity cooperatives, worker and consumer coops, and partnerships with government on City land. By removing housing from the speculative market, these models help combat displacement and strengthen neighborhood stability.
“Every New Yorker deserves a safe, affordable home, and as we lay out in the Block by Block housing plan, we are committed to protecting tenants’ rights, helping stabilize at-risk buildings, and exploring new models of community ownership. In this critical moment for housing in New York City, we appreciate this report’s recommendations, and we look forward to working with all stakeholders to expand access to affordable, quality housing for generations to come,” said Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Dina Levy.
These efforts are leading 18 community ownership projects that will produce 823 units of permanently affordable housing: 697 units for homeownership and 126 units for rent. Of those, 245 are already occupied by tenants. This creates opportunities for hundreds of New Yorkers, including:
Housing
- In East New York, tenants are converting a poorly maintained rental building into a permanently affordable cooperative as part of The East New York Community Land Trust.
- In East Harlem, residents have moved or are readying to move into four buildings that will be in the East Harlem El Barrio Community Land Trust.
- In Queens, first-time homeowners are moving into newly constructed passive houses through the Interboro Community Land Trust, trading property appreciation for affordability, limited equity, and multi-generational security.
- In the Rockaways, residents are planning a 119-lot development as part of the ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust.
Community Assets
- After 15 years of community organizing in Mott Haven, South Bronx Unite gained control of the Lincoln Recovery Center and raised the $45 million needed to transform the historic site into a center for community health and culture.
- The Kingsbridge Armory – the largest armory in the country, which was vacant for over 30 years – will be partially owned by the community and transformed into an economic and cultural hub by Our Bronx.
Economic Development
- Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice won a contract to activate unused land under the Bruckner Expressway as an economic engine that features concessions, art, and a flea market.
- The Central Brooklyn Food Coop is joining forces with worker-owned food businesses supported by RiseBoro Community Partnership to create an oasis of healthy food in an affordable housing development.
The report documents these achievements and makes recommendations to expand community-controlled housing and real estate as tools to preserve affordability and limit displacement. Community ownership was included in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s housing plan, Block by Block, as one way to help address housing affordability and displacement, which has emerged as a growing strategy in New York City’s housing policy discussions.
“Change Capital Fund is excited to share the impressive accomplishments of the eight grantees we have supported over the last three and a half years. They are turning their communities’ dreams and visions into bricks and mortar, expanding opportunities that provide a secure future for people now living in New York City’s low-income communities,” said Chantella Mitchell, Co-Chair, Change Capital Fund, Program Director, New York Community Trust.
The report features recommendations to other funders and City and State policymakers about how best to support the community ownership ecosystem at this moment of unusual urgency and opportunity, including:
- Increase operating support: Expand government and philanthropic operating support for community organizations as community ownership moves toward sustainable scale.
- Open the public land pipeline: City government should open the public land and disposition pipeline for community ownership.
- Provide fast, flexible capital: Deploy capital that moves at the speed of the private market to realize the potential of policies such as the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) and opportunities to convert affordable housing into permanently affordable social housing.
- Build field infrastructure: Philanthropy, the field, and city government should build the shared stewardship and field infrastructure that community ownership depends on.
“We literally didn’t have the security of a locked door to our building. Now we are making our home what we want it to be – safe, clean, well-run, and maintained. The tenants of our building look forward to being owners – owners in cooperation,” said Ana Markland, President, 248 Arlington Avenue Tenants Council.
“Our Bronx is proud to be a vehicle for moving the aspirations of Bronx residents into reality. Community ownership is not a fringe idea; it is a proven, financially sound strategy to preserve affordability, prevent displacement, and ensure that the wealth created in our neighborhoods benefits the people who have invested in them for generations,” said Sandra Lobo, Executive Director, Our Bronx.
We Can Own New York City’s Future was announced at the Housing Affordability and Community Ownership Forum, where representatives from city government, philanthropy, finance, affordable housing, and community organizations convened to discuss ways to increase the share of community-controlled housing in New York City.
The next CCF grant cycle will begin in 2027 to sustain the community ownership movement’s momentum.
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About Change Capital Fund
Change Capital Fund (CCF) is a 22-member donor collaborative consisting of corporate philanthropy, foundations, intermediaries, and the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. In 2023, CCF launched a four-year funding cycle to support eight community ownership organizations in New York City as they built their capacity to engage in the active development of community-controlled real estate.
Current CCF members include: Altman Foundation, Amalgamated Bank, Bank United, Capital One, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners, Goldman Sachs, HSBC Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, M&T Charitable Foundation, MUFG, New York Foundation, Principal Foundation, Santander Bank, Scherman Foundation, The New York Community Trust, Trinity Church Wall Street, United Way of New York City, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo Bank, and the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (ex officio).
About HR&A Advisors
HR&A Advisors, Inc. (HR&A), an employee-owned company, helps cities tackle their most pressing challenges. For over 50 years, HR&A has guided public, private, and nonprofit leaders through high-stakes decisions that create impact. We combine rigorous analysis with creative problem-solving to unlock investment, expand opportunity, and bring communities to life. Learn more at hraadvisors.com.
Read the Essential Yet Invisible report online
Download the Essential Yet Invisible report
This report is from the Change Capital Fund (CCF). We are funders who have pooled our resources to support neighborhood-based, community development corporations for twenty-five years. Our long-term relationship with our grantees affords us an opportunity to get to know them well and we are grateful for their dedication, adaptability, and resilience. Born in crises, New York City’s community development corporations (CDCs) formed to rebuild homes and revitalize their neighborhoods, renovating over 100,000 apartments as affordable housing and putting thousands of buildings back on the tax rolls. Today, they remain essential emergency responders that work directly with residents to soften the blows of crises, call attention to the experiences of low-income people, and advocate for public policies that support them. Our grantees were behind successful organizing campaigns that are preventing hundreds of thousands of evictions and that will provide relief for undocumented workers.
]]>View the MDRIC Final Evaluation Report
CCF’s goal is to build the capacity of community anchor organizations to increase economic mobility among low-income people living in high-poverty neighborhoods. Our approach is to provide flexible funding combined with technical assistance to enable our grantees to use data to set their directions, improve their programs and, ultimately increase the scale of effective efforts.
CCF is undertaking this work at an inflection point in the community development field, a time when the purpose of community development is, perhaps, not as well understood as it was when CDCs were the developers of last resort in a city literally scorched by disinvestment.
CCF’s first four-year cycle reaffirmed our premise that these organizations, which combine housing, organizing and services, are meaningful change agents in their communities. CDCs:
- dramatically improve living conditions for low-income residents through the provision of affordable housing and neighborhood investments;
- increase economic mobility through education, social services and workforce programs; and,
- empower residents, giving them a voice in determining the fate of their communities and citywide policies through community engaged planning and organizing.
The findings of the first cycle affirm our decision to focus on building grantees’ performance management capacity. At the outset of the first cycle, each of our grantees was tracking data – sometimes the same information – in multiple systems without being able to use it to analyze their overall success. As MDRC’s report confirms, with CCF funding and technical assistance, our grantees have built systems and altered their internal practices and culture to become more deliberate learning organizations: able to more critically evaluate their own results across programs and able to use this information to improve their programs and to demonstrate their success. This capacity helped the organizations win new funding to grow. The four organizations have raised over $21 million in new funding in their first four years and both the number of people served and the outcomes improved over the four-year cycle. In some case, new streamlined, cross-program data systems generated efficiencies that allowed staff to focus more time on services rather than data entry.
An insight gained through the evaluation and practice is that improving grantees’ ability to use data strengthened their ability to partner. The report cites examples of St. Nicks and New Settlement reviewing data together with their school partners, causing the schools to increase their investments in the partnership and creating a virtuous cycle of increased data sharing enabling more children to be served more effectively.
We learned that the work of honing performance management skills is more labor intensive, more expensive, and more time consuming than we initially believed. We changed the way we provide technical assistance to enable the organizations to work individually with quality consultants. That internal work, along with their ability to hire full-time evaluation staff, generated the majority of the internal capacity improvements. Thus, our new cycle will see more streamlined application of this approach.
A meaningful, unexplored question is which services are most effectively delivered by CDCs as opposed to city-wide, regional, sectoral or other types of nonprofit organizations. That is not a question which MDRC investigated though CCF gleaned some insights:
- In addition to housing development, our grantees were effective, knowledgeable housing advocates. Several innovative citywide housing policies legislated during the four year cycle were spearheaded by CCF grantees, for example, the Right to Counsel Campaign and anti-harassment provisions to protect tenants. These organizations have knowledge and credibility in the housing policy arena shared by few other NYC nonprofits.
- During the course of the CCF initiative all of our grantees engaged their communities in major planning efforts, some in response to planned rezonings or other major land use changes, demonstrating their critical role in empowering residents to shape the future of their neighborhoods.
- Educational services stood out as a high-impact intervention. CHLDC and NSA have developed public schools and college access programming with extraordinary success rates. A pilot afterschool program at St. Nicks demonstrated dramatic results in improving reading.
- In the workforce sector, grantees’ greatest successes related to their roles as on-ramps to effective training. FAC recruited and then helped place underserved residents of public housing in quality sectoral training. They created remedial classes to enable participants to pass threshold requirements to employment programs where they went on to achieve the same success as other participants. Similarly, CHLDC provides recruitment, case management, and retention services for a Carpenter’s Union Apprenticeship program.
- Grantees report that the connections they establish with residents through provision of direct services strengthen their organizing and advocacy efforts.
As the report notes, grantees value CCF’s flexible, multi-year funding that enables organizations to become more data driven, a rare niche in the funding community. CCF received 34 proposals to join our initiative in the second round and we turned down many worthy proposals. We think that many more place-based nonprofits would benefit from this kind of investment and are looking forward to continuing our work with our first cohort and four new grantees.
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Read the report here.
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Read the report here.
]]>This series highlights issues for practitioners and funders involved with comprehensive community initiatives. The first brief described CCF in detail; introduced the initiative’s five grantees (New Settlement Apartments in the Bronx and St. Nicks Alliance, the Fifth Avenue Committee, Community Solutions/Brownsville Partnership, and Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation in Brooklyn); and shared the organizations’ ambitious work plans and start-up efforts. This second brief describes two pervasive challenges to service coordination and the ways grantees have responded to them.
Read the full brief here.
]]>This brief describes the grantees’ neighborhoods and their strategies to fight poverty and highlights some of the early lessons from the initiative. The brief illustrates how community organizations are uniquely positioned to undertake economic opportunity initiatives by reaching underserved populations and mobilizing high-quality services for them. The brief also identifies what sets CCF apart from other place-based initiatives.
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