Three decades after the iconic Cooper Square Community Land Trust became the first in New York City, the New Economy Project is releasing the first-ever interactive map of community land trusts across all five boroughs in New York City.

The map, created with the help of media agency F.Y. Eye, documents 19 community land trusts that are providing New York City residents with deeply affordable rental housing, creating shared equity co-ops, converting abandoned property into art centers and more.

“New Economy Project has used maps [as a visual tool] for 25 years, but so many of our maps are about showing inequality like extraction from Black and Brown neighborhoods or forms of predatory lending,” says New Economy Project Executive Director Deyanira Del Río.

“We’ve produced maps that show the absence of bank branches and the proliferation of check cashers. This map is one of the few maps we’ve created that show affirmative solutions and the power of these ideas.”

Each community land trust is shown with a red icon; when a user clicks one of these icons, the map displays a short description of the land trust along with demographic and socioeconomic data about its neighborhoods.

Some of these CLTs have been able to acquire land and now buildings. For example, The East Harlem/El Barrio Community Land Trust, formed in 2014, acquired its first four buildings in November 2020 for just $1 each. Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, GrowHouse NYC has played a different role in protecting its community member: After establishing the BLAC Land Trust, the organization secured citywide recognition of the Flatbush African Burial Ground, preventing its sale to private developers in 2021.

Why are community land trusts growing in NYC?

Every initiative on the interactive map began with a group of people organizing against racial and socioeconomic inequality, Del Río says. Ultimately, their organizing efforts led them to pursue collective ownership through community land trusts.

CLTs are non-profit, democratically-governed organizations that acquire and steward land on behalf of community members. CLTs can offer long-term use of the lands to individual property owners through a renewable ground lease to create permanently affordable residential, commercial and community spaces. With the separation of building and land, CLTs can ensure that the building usage — apartments, a community center, etc – is rented at an affordable price rather than being treated as a commodity.

What’s behind the surge in CLTs across New York over the past two decades?

Del Río says that the creation of the New York City Community Land Initiative (NYCCLI), a coalition of grassroots organizing and social justice groups working to advance non-speculative housing and neighborhood-led development, is one of the main factors. Born from the collaborative efforts between Picture the Homeless, New Economy Project, and Manhattan Community Board 11, NYCCLI officially formed as a coalition in 2014 although their work began long before that. Since the coalition’s founding, 10 times more cooperatives have hit New York City and they’re developing at a much faster rate than ever before, Del Río says.

Del Río attributes NYCCLI’s base building, constant outreach, but mainly their popular education efforts to more and more organizing groups discovering CLTs as a possible way of securing stability and income for rent-burdened communities.

When the coalition started, Del Río says, the first thing they noticed was a massive information gap and lack of awareness about the impact CLTs can have on underresourced communities. They began by using Cooper Square as an example of a transformative model of a successful social housing practice. One of their popular education tools is a board game called Trustville, where players pretend to be CLT board members themselves.

Del Río also points to a hard-fought $7.5 million city council investment, which began in 2019 and has been renewed annually ever since, toward fostering CLTs.

“We want this map to show city council members who have invested just how deep the impact is. It’s a way to highlight the amazing work and scale up,” says Dey.

To win those funds, NYCCLI — with the help of many organized groups like the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition — did hundreds of hours of outreach to secure the introduction and sponsorship of many city council bills prioritizing CLT funding.

Edward Garcia, organizing director at the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, says he hopes this map shows city officials that there is an ecosystem of people working hard to make these CLTs happen. “Hopefully these maps show elected officials how hard we’re working and help us get the visibility we need to secure more resources for our people,” says Garcia. That includes securing buildings on CLT land.

“The reason we’ve been sitting on these sites for a while without buildings is because we get the shittiest deals, and realtors never call us back, and we can’t compete with market prices,” says Garcia. “The reality is nothing comes easy for us.”

Get involved

If you live in New York City, take note of blooming CLTs in your neighborhood with the interactive map and follow up using the data tab.

This post was originally published on Next City.