Title: Shared Land in High Demand
Description: New York City continues to face a serious crisis in housing affordability. While the city implements a plethora of top-down planning strategies to address this crisis, some are looking to more experimental, bottom-up approaches to not only affordable housing, but larger questions of community control, empowerment, and property stewardship. As the city’s stock of public land dwindles compared to decades ago, each parcel becomes increasingly important in the fight against the unrelenting real estate industry. This paper addresses these ongoing frictions through the lens of the Community Land Trust model, a form of shared-equity ownership that seeks to decommodify property and empower local residents. Consultation of relevant literature, background of the model in the United States, local contextual research on shared equity in New York, and interviews with those most embedded in the CLT movement all inform a set of final findings and recommendations for how the city government might best approach the grassroots energy around the CLT model, and perhaps more importantly, how to not co-opt the movement.