How Will the COVID-19 Crisis Shape the Future of Community Land Trusts?
Q&A with Tony Hernandez, Managing Director, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative
Written by Adam Tanaka and Amelia Taylor-Hochberg
This article is the fifth in a series of HR&A interviews with urban leaders across the country exploring how the COVID-19 crisis is impacting every aspect of urban life.
The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) in Roxbury, Massachusetts was founded in the 1980s in response to chronic neighborhood disinvestment. DSNI was a trailblazer in its use of City-backed eminent domain to acquire vacant land and transform it into community-controlled assets. Today, DSNI and its subsidiary community land trust (CLT) manage more than 200 affordable housing units, a greenhouse, and an urban farm. A nonprofit form of land management and ownership, CLTs protect affordability through long-term ground leases accompanied by strict rent and resale restrictions.
To learn more about how DSNI is responding to the pandemic, we spoke to Tony Hernandez, the organization’s Managing Director. A Roxbury native, Tony was trained as an architect and has led DSNI’s real estate portfolio since 2014.
Can you tell us how DSNI’s day-to-day activities have shifted since the onset of the crisis?
As a community organization, the bread and butter of our work is physical interaction. Overnight, COVID-19 stripped away our ability to gather in numbers. So we have done a 180: instead of the community coming to us, we are now going to them. We are making phone calls and dropping food, gift cards, and other essential goods at people’s front doors.
Due to the crisis we have had to put new systems in place when deploying staff in the community. When dropping off gift cards, for instance, we have one staff person ready to call the homeowner to tell them the right time to come out of their front door to maintain social distancing.
We are also surveying our community members with short questions so that when we receive funding, we know how to distribute it. It is amazing nowadays what a phone call can do.
Since the onset of the crisis, has DSNI been able to secure emergency funds from government or philanthropy?
We have recently distributed close to $30,000 from a grant from the Boston Resiliency Fund. Over 100 community members benefited from this emergency relief money. Unfortunately, there are many more community members in need, so we are hoping for a second round of funding.
We have also received grants from foundations who have stepped up given the urgency of the crisis. In some cases, foundations have waived restrictions on funds, enabling us to spend the money more flexibly. This has been a game changer.
We have also taken advantage of the Paycheck Protection Program from the federal stimulus package. This will keep us whole for the next few months and enable us to plan ahead to the next fiscal year.
As a leader in the CLT movement globally, have you been in touch with CLTs domestically or internationally over the past two months? What have you heard from your peers in terms of how they are responding to the crisis?
I have touched base with practitioners as far out as California and Belgium and shared our experiences in how we are adapting our grassroots organizing. A lot of domestic organizations are taking advantage of the Paycheck Protection Program, but some folks were not aware of it, so we are also spreading the word about that.
Of course, the crisis is impacting CLTs very differently depending on their context. We are in quite a high density urban setting, but many other CLTs are in more rural areas where there is a lot of space between properties. These CLTs are experiencing less disruption to their day-to-day operations.
Research suggests that CLTs weathered the Great Recession more successfully than conventional, market-rate housing. Is there anything in the DNA of CLTs that you think will make them more resilient during this crisis as well?
Absolutely. The CLT model was intentionally designed to preserve affordability and fight speculation. The combination of a below-market ground lease and caps on resales keeps our homes affordable in perpetuity. We had zero foreclosures during the subprime mortgage crisis, and I believe our homeowners will also keep their homes at higher rates than market-rate homeowners during this pandemic. Thankfully, interest rates are also at record lows, which will enable homeowners to refinance their properties and hopefully achieve even greater affordability.
Crises are painful in the short term, but they can also provide opportunities to rethink social, political, and economic structures. What opportunities to you see to capitalize on this moment to advance an equitable agenda?
One of the positives of this situation is that we are building stronger connections with the community than ever before. As a community-based organization, our work is rooted in the education and empowerment of people. Having community members show up to our meetings is essential so that we can advocate to our elected officials and get the funds we need for housing, workforce development, youth programs, and healthy eating initiatives. The silver lining, I hope, is that we will come out of this more connected and more engaged than ever.
