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No progressive housing pitch today is complete without a mention of Community Land Trusts (CLTs). CLTs have become a hot topic — especially in today’s affordable housing crisis — because they decommodify land, taking it out of the speculative market so that no one can flip a house or build luxury condos on it. The first CLT, New Communities, Inc., was designed by organizers from the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s as a mechanism for community control of land — especially for black communities in the rural South — in response to devastating rates of black land loss. Then in the 1980s and 1990s, CLTs emerged in cities, where they proved useful both in reducing blight and providing stability in disinvested neighborhoods. Now, the model is often touted by organizers as a “radical” way to secure community control of land and housing for the working class as prices go up, especially in the urban core of many American cities. But in my time talking with hundreds of people in the CLT field across the United States during my PhD research on CLTs, it became clear that the CLT model is increasingly being perceived and promoted by housing advocates and practitioners as an economically efficient affordable housing strategy, rather than an organizational approach that empowers poor, working-class, and marginalized people to take control of the land they occupy. The creators of the CLT model intended for collective decision-making around site planning and development to be controlled by the users of the land, with a board of CLT trustees (some living outside the CLT’s land) ensuring the land stayed affordable for generations. But as the model grew and proliferated, highly professionalized boards and staff started running the show in most CLTs. One executive director from a CLT in Minnesota told me and my research team their thoughts about some of the old-time radicals at the early national CLT conferences: This is a business. This is about economic sense. I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid. You can’t make me. I think you’re all nuts that you’re taking the commune kind of approach to life. That’s not what we’re about. We’re about getting people into homeownership. A staff person from another CLT, who responded to a question about community engagement initiatives in their CLT, said: It’s about offering these opportunities [affordable homeownership] to more and more and more families who desperately need it. So we’ll do whatever we can do to expand those opportunities. If it comes through some form of homeowner engagement, that’s great, but we aren’t reliant on that and we see it as a secondary issue. These sentiments are not unusual among the majority of CLT practitioners. Even the national organization for CLTs (which, after a controversial merger, now promotes other housing strategies as well) has come to define their purpose as providing “permanently affordable housing.” And as the ideal of community control was erased from practitioners’ internal dialogue and organizational mission statements, it also all but faded from practice.

How Did This Happen? This happened, in part, because the CLT model (as it is typically implemented) is not financially self-sustaining. Most CLTs focus on providing an affordable single-family homeownership option in which the organization owns the land underneath the house, and the resident owns the house and pays a small monthly ground lease fee ($35 or so) to the CLT for use of the land underneath the house. CLTs, then, tend to be dependent on external funding , because ground lease fees alone are not enough to pay someone to complete the set of tasks administering a CLT necessitates (overseeing home sales, screening potential buyers, linking buyers with lenders, and collecting lease fees, among others). Funding a CLT’s operations then becomes one of the primary motivators of the organization. And as HUD funding dwindles, securing coveted HOME or Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) awards has become a highly competitive process requiring formulaic objectives, exact budgets, and absurdly regimented financial record-keeping practices.

CDBG Requirements: A Case in Point About a year ago, I was appointed by my local alderperson to the Citizen Advisory Committee (CAC) to oversee a city’s allocation of CDBG funding. I saw the absurdity firsthand. Every local government body that allocates CDBG funds is required to have a CAC, nominally to give localities more control over the administration of federal grants. In practice, sitting on the CAC felt like being a cog in the federal bureaucracy, a volunteer administrator checking boxes and adding up points, making sure all the grant sub-recipients fulfilled their end of the agreement. CACs monitor each recipient nonprofit’s economic activity and progress toward stated objectives, acting as a disciplinarian to make sure they satisfy HUD’s requirements. If the CAC fails to properly discipline any sub-recipient, the city could lose the entirety of its CDBG funding. As early as 1969, Sherry Arnstein (famous for her piece, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”) put CACs on the lowest rung of the participation ladder, Manipulation, or a “distortion of participation into a public relations vehicle by powerholders.” In the decades since Arnstein’s writing, local power to influence decisions over the allocation of CDBG funds has been tightened even further, ostensibly to reduce the mismanagement of funds. The resulting requirements are nearly impossible for small nonprofits to meet. For example, for an organization to simply purchase program supplies using CDBG funds, they must: Request a withdrawal of CDBG funds from the municipality

Buy the supplies within three days (or else write a justification for why the purchase took longer than three days or return the funds)

Produce and keep a purchase order or requisition form from an authorized representative of the organization

Keep an invoice from the vendor with a signature from an organizational representative that the goods were received

Document where the supplies are stored

Document which cost objective(s) were fulfilled by the purchase of the supplies

Document which budget line item the supplies fall under

Ensure that the three separate individuals in the organization handle (1) authorizing the transaction, (2) recording the transaction, and (3) maintaining custody of goods purchased All of these requirements, of course, come after an organization has already written a specifically organized grant application meeting the objectives and checkboxes required by HUD, including documentation of highly regimented accounting practices in their organization. The regulations around CDBG allocation represent just one example of how the dominant paradigm of grant funding inhibits the autonomy of nonprofits. Private foundations can be just as cumbersome and biased in their grant stipulations. And, of course, only specific activities fall under the grantees’ goals. CDBG money, for example, very explicitly does not fund “political activities.”

The Result: Professionalization and the Abandonment of Community Organizing Requirements like those above are what led authors and editors of The Revolution Will Not be Funded to argue for the abandonment of grant funding for nonprofit work. Just the administrative burden of meeting the conditions of funders requires paid staff, office equipment, budgeting software, and professional skillsets beyond the capacity of many grassroots organizations. Once they grow to the capacity to handle grant application and administration tasks, many organizations find their goals totally transformed to meet the goals of their funders and their energy for grassroots organizing channeled into bureaucratic work. This argument is not new: Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in their 1979 analysis of social movements, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail , make the case that “organizations endure, in short, by abandoning their oppositional politics.” The result of these funding trends for the CLT movement is that it shifted from being a movement for community control of land and became a group of affordable homeownership providers largely delinked from grassroots organizing efforts. There are exceptions, of course, but CLTs with more radical ideals of community control and anti-gentrification organizing tend to have a harder time finding the funds to fulfill their missions. Most CLT funders are concerned primarily with the number of affordable homes secured, not the ways that residents are engaged or the specific needs of the local community. Some CLTs have managed to develop community centers, playgrounds, commercial spaces, and urban farms — which they saw as important for their local communities — by getting more creative with their budgets and funding sources. Paul Kivel’s chapter in The Revolution Will Not be Funded encourages organizations to think about who they are accountable to: funders or grassroots organizations? He writes: In the nonprofit industrial complex, accountability is directed toward the ruling class and its managers — toward foundations, donors, government officials, larger non-profits, research institutes, universities, and the media. These are all forms of top-down accountability. I am suggesting a bottom-up accountability guided by those on the frontlines of grassroots struggles for justice. In which direction does your accountability lie?