Afford­able hous­ing may not have received much atten­tion in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, but it’s on the minds of many vot­ers. A nation­al sur­vey released by Ipsos Pub­lic Affairs in July found that six in 10 Amer­i­cans say it’s a key issue for them, and near­ly six­ty per­cent of respon­dents say their local offi­cials are not doing enough to improve hous­ing affordability.

Faced with ris­ing hous­ing costs, at least twelve cities will be vot­ing on afford­able hous­ing bal­lot ini­tia­tives come Elec­tion Day – with most of them revolv­ing around con­struct­ing more afford­able units and pro­vid­ing more sup­port for the homeless.

In addi­tion to push­ing for bond and loan ref­er­en­dums that would cre­ate new financ­ing for these ends in pricey areas like San Fran­cis­co and Oak­land, com­mu­ni­ty activists are con­fronting a deep­en­ing hous­ing cri­sis in Bal­ti­more, a city that’s often over­looked in dis­cus­sions of afford­abil­i­ty. Bal­ti­more res­i­dents will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to vote on a bal­lot ini­tia­tive that would amend the city’s char­ter to cre­ate an afford­able hous­ing trust fund – an enti­ty to pro­vide hous­ing assis­tance for fam­i­lies mak­ing 50 per­cent or less than the area medi­an income. The fund could also sup­port a vari­ety of oth­er afford­able hous­ing efforts, such as pro­vid­ing home­own­er­ship work­shops and cred­it coun­sel­ing, devel­op­ing new low-income hous­ing or reha­bil­i­tat­ing vacants.

Many Amer­i­cans think of places like New York, Wash­ing­ton D.C., and San Fran­cis­co as the most unaf­ford­able places to live, but though they have high­er rents, they also also high­er medi­an incomes. Johns Hop­kins grad­u­ate stu­dent Philip Gar­bo­den ana­lyzed the most recent Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty Sur­vey and Amer­i­can Hous­ing Sur­vey data and found that of the top 25 largest cities in the coun­try, Bal­ti­more ranks fifth for rental hous­ing bur­dens, behind only Detroit, Los Ange­les, Philadel­phia, and Mem­phis. (Los Ange­les res­i­dents will be vot­ing on two hous­ing ini­tia­tives this Novem­ber – one that would raise prop­er­ty tax­es to fund hous­ing for the chron­i­cal­ly home­less, and anoth­er that would require large hous­ing devel­op­ments to set aside a por­tion of units for low-income res­i­dents.) Despite Bal­ti­more rents rank­ing as aver­age among the 25 largest cities, only six cities have low­er medi­an incomes, and all of those six cities have low­er medi­an rents.

For the 34 per­cent of Bal­ti­more renters who live below the pover­ty line, the chal­lenge of find­ing afford­able units on the pri­vate mar­ket has grown increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult — not to men­tion that the major­i­ty of poor renters in Bal­ti­more receive no hous­ing sub­si­dies from the gov­ern­ment. The city has also seen sharp rent increas­es in recent years, so mid­dle class fam­i­lies with stag­nant incomes have also expe­ri­enced unprece­dent­ed hous­ing bur­dens. In the past six years, the num­ber of cost-bur­dened mid­dle-income renter house­hold­ers in the city shot up from 1,800 to more than 7,500.

Afford­able hous­ing trust funds are not a new idea, but they’ve attract­ed more atten­tion as of late. ​“They have def­i­nite­ly been pick­ing up at a greater clip,” says Mary Brooks, the senior advi­sor of the Cen­ter for Com­mu­ni­ty Change’s Hous­ing Trust Fund Project. ​“When I start­ed work­ing on these in the late 1980s there was only a hand­ful, and now there are 770 exist­ing in cities, coun­ties, and states across the coun­try.” They’re no panacea – plen­ty of cost­ly cities, includ­ing San Fran­cis­co, Chica­go, and Boston have them – and a hous­ing trust fund’s effec­tive­ness depends large­ly on how com­mit­ted the local juris­dic­tion is to fund­ing it. But they can be pow­er­ful tools: in Wash­ing­ton D.C., their for­mi­da­ble trust fund receives annu­al allo­ca­tions of $100 million.

Brooks says that hous­ing trust funds tend to be polit­i­cal­ly pop­u­lar because their dol­lars are extreme­ly flex­i­ble – there are few­er strings attached to how mon­ey can be direct­ed, so funds can be used at dif­fer­ent times for dif­fer­ent things. ​“A com­mu­ni­ty could say, ​‘Okay, we want to improve exist­ing prop­er­ties’ – and they do that for a few years,” says Brooks. ​“And then they could say, ​‘Okay, now let’s start pro­duc­ing new housing.”

Hous­ing for All Bal­ti­more, a coali­tion of local groups, includ­ing the ACLU of Mary­land, the Com­mu­ni­ty Devel­op­ment Net­work of Mary­land, CASA de Mary­land, Enter­prise Com­mu­ni­ty Part­ners, and Unit­ed Work­ers cam­paigned for the ref­er­en­dum. Vol­un­teers need­ed to col­lect 10,000 sig­na­tures to get the ini­tia­tive on the bal­lot, and ulti­mate­ly gath­ered more than 18,500 over the sum­mer months. The Bal­ti­more Board of Elec­tions then cer­ti­fied 12,057 of those signatures.

Unit­ed Work­ers, a Bal­ti­more-based human rights orga­ni­za­tion, did a lot of the orga­niz­ing leg­work to col­lect peti­tion sig­na­tures. Mem­bers sta­tioned them­selves all over the city — from gro­cery stores, to church­es, to com­mu­ni­ty fes­ti­vals. ​“I was sur­prised by the diver­si­ty of inter­est in this issue,” says Todd Cherkis, an orga­niz­er with the group. ​“There real­ly just hasn’t been robust pub­lic pol­i­cy around afford­able hous­ing and com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven devel­op­ment in this city, and we found that that there real­ly was wide­spread support.”

Last Jan­u­ary Unit­ed Work­ers unveiled their ​“20÷20 Vision” cam­paign – a call for $20 mil­lion annu­al­ly invest­ed in pub­lic bonds for com­mu­ni­ty land trusts, and $20 mil­lion annu­al­ly invest­ed in pub­lic bonds to hire the unem­ployed to decon­struct Baltimore’s noto­ri­ous vacant hous­ing. ​“The 20/20 cam­paign is a set of demands and goals that attempt to rewire the city to actu­al­ly meet people’s hous­ing demands, cre­ate jobs and do sus­tain­able devel­op­ment,” says Cherkis. ​“The hous­ing trust fund would be a vehi­cle to help raise resources direct­ly to do some of this. It’s only a first step.”

If the mea­sure pass­es, steep chal­lenges will remain. Chief among them, the bal­lot ini­tia­tive does not come with any source of fund­ing because the state con­sti­tu­tion pro­hibits appro­pri­a­tions by ref­er­en­dum. Instead, the ref­er­en­dum would empow­er the City Coun­cil to direct funds into the trust fund. At present, only the may­or has that author­i­ty. ​“That’s why we need­ed the ref­er­en­dum,” explains Odette Ramos, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Com­mu­ni­ty Devel­op­ment Net­work of Mary­land. ​“We thought if we tried to do it through the leg­isla­tive process, the may­or would veto it.” When asked how much she antic­i­pates going into the trust fund, Ramos says she’s ​“hope­ful” that that they can raise between $15 – 25 mil­lion. The fund would be open to pub­lic financ­ing, includ­ing from state and fed­er­al sources, as well as pri­vate financ­ing, like indi­vid­ual donors and phil­an­thropic orga­ni­za­tions. Advo­cates say they’re explor­ing dif­fer­ent ded­i­cat­ed rev­enue sources, like a tax on AirBnB rentals. There are also dis­cus­sions around pres­sur­ing local uni­ver­si­ties to pay direct­ly into the hous­ing trust fund, as they are cur­rent­ly exempt from pay­ing prop­er­ty tax­es. ​“We’ll throw every­thing on the wall and see what sticks,” Ramos says.

Not every­one is enthu­si­as­tic about the ini­tia­tive. Car­ol Ott, a local hous­ing advo­cate, says she’s vot­ing against the trust fund this Novem­ber. ​“This is what Bal­ti­more does,” she tweet­ed. ​“Invests in straw­man ​‘game chang­ers’ that change lit­tle to noth­ing for those who need it the most.” Ott calls for cre­at­ing a pro­gram that allows mid­dle-income afford­able rental hous­ing to coex­ist with home­own­er-occu­pied homes, as well as divert­ing more resources from sub­si­dized down­town devel­op­ments to neglect­ed, poor neigh­bor­hoods (some­thing Unit­ed Work­ers also supports).

While the goal of rais­ing $25 mil­lion for a Bal­ti­more hous­ing trust fund seems rel­a­tive­ly pal­try com­pared to the likes of Wash­ing­ton D.C., Mary Brooks says not to under­es­ti­mate what even a mod­est hous­ing trust fund could accom­plish in Bal­ti­more, and notes that funds in oth­er cities – like Nashville and Rich­mond – have increased their rev­enues over time. If the bal­lot mea­sure pass­es, sup­port­ers say they don’t expect to see mon­ey come out of the trust fund until at least 2018. Advo­cates will also have a brand new city coun­cil and may­or to work with fol­low­ing November’s elec­tion. Accord­ing to The Bal­ti­more Sun, about half of cur­rent coun­cilmem­bers are retir­ing, seek­ing oth­er office, or lost their April may­oral primaries.