When Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York City in 2014, he made no secret of his intent to place affordable housing at the center of his term. Not long after his election, he rolled out his Housing New York plan–a 10-year strategy to build or preserve around 200,000 affordable units across the city’s five boroughs.

Affordable, when it comes to housing in New York, is a slippery term. Critics of de Blasio’s plan have pointed out that the majority of the units built or converted under Housing New York remain out of reach of low-income New Yorkers–those earning less than $43,000 per year. And while the plan has succeeded making a nearly 100,000 unit dent in the city’s 550,000 affordable-unit shortfall, the terms of the new unit’s affordability are ephemeral: The majority of the units created and preserved under the mayor’s plan are only regulated temporarily, often for as little as two decades. There is no guarantee that a unit designated as affordable today will remain so in perpetuity, and with New York’s population growing and incomes failing to meet living costs, the structure of de Blasio’s plan has left housing advocates concerned.

A more radical housing model, one that ensures that units will remain affordable in perpetuity by linking housing costs to income, not market rates, is called a community land trust (CLT). CLTs have, since the concept originated in 1969, advanced the idea that housing is a need, and must remain accessible to all city residents. To date, there are over 200 CLTs nationwide. As member-organized nonprofits, CLTs use a combination of public and private funds to buy up a property and place it into community ownership. If the units are being leased, the rent is not tied to the real estate market: CLTs calculate prices by taking one-third of the local median wage, multiplying it by the standard 25-year mortgage rate, and adding a deposit rate of 10%. Other CLTs sell their units, but should the owner decide to sell, they must set the sale price via a formula that follows the same principles. That stipulation essentially positions housing as a necessity changing hands, rather than a commodity being bought up by a new owner willing to pay the price.

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development recently announced that it will be distributing a $1.65 million grant among four local community land trust organizations. The money comes out of $3.5 in settlements negotiated by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman against, appropriately enough, many of the large financial institutions culpable in the housing crisis; the nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners worked with the attorney general’s office to secure the funds for the development of CLTs across the state of New York, and divvied up the money between New York City and three other CLT initiatives in Albany and Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island.

New York City is currently home to just one fully fledged CLT: The Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association, which was established in 1994 in the East Village after a lengthy negotiation process. The city contains of the most complex networks of affordable housing solutions in the country: A combination of private, public, and nonprofit developers have a stake in the landscape. The fiscal crisis of the 1970s left a wide swath of properties vacant, relatively valueless, and in the hands of the city. In the ’80s, Mayor Ed Koch began an initiative to get those city-owned properties into the hands of developers that would rehab them into viable, profitable units. The introduction of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit in 1986 incentivized developers to convert and build affordable units, but under temporary agreements that would eventually allow them to turn market- rate. “Land trusts just didn’t take off then because there were so many different models,” Matt Murphy, assistant commissioner of strategic planning for HPD, tells Fast Company. And with the city on the upswing from a deep recession, preserving affordability over time was less of a concern.

But now, Murphy says, “the affordable housing crisis is so strong that there’s a pressure to figure out what the silver bullet is.” That silver bullet, Murphy adds, is not CLTs alone. “The reality is that it’s going to be a matter of continuing to build and rehabilitate as much affordable housing as we can,” he says. But the structure of the CLT model adds something new to the city’s affordable housing landscape: a permanent bulwark against gentrification. By giving resident, community-led organizations permanent jurisdiction over a section of property, CLTs ensure that lower-income residents retain representation in community development decisions, and stand in the way of developers unilaterally bulldozing neighborhoods for the sake of profit-by-gentrification.

The grant, which Enterprise Community Partners will administer directly, will enable Cooper Square to expand, but also support the development and expansion of more nascent CLT initiatives in the city. The newly formed Interboro CLT will use the money to begin acquiring properties in low-income areas in the Bronx, central Brooklyn, and Queens. The East Harlem/El Barrio CLT will work with an affordable housing developer to acquire and rehabilitate a group of buildings in the neighborhood for conversion to a CLT, and the New York City Community Land Initiative, a recently formed CLT advocacy organization, will put the grant money toward convening technical assistance and learning exchange programs for community groups interested in founding a CLT.