Lawyering for Community Control of Land

Affordable housing and homelessness

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

While corporations and investors acquire more housing at rapid rates, LA faces a growing homelessness crisis and deficit of 500,000 affordable homes. This commodification of housing is driving the housing crisis, as corporate owners are more likely to seek to evict tenants and raise rents to extract maximum profits, resulting in displacement, gentrification, excessive rent burden, and homelessness, all of which primarily impact low-income communities and communities of color. To fight this growing trend, communities are organizing and laying the foundation for a future where more of LA’s housing stock is permanently affordable and community-controlled. Community organizations are pursuing many innovative strategies to accomplish this, such as social housing, community land trusts, cooperatives, land banks, and reclaiming land. All of these alternatives to commodified housing need legal and policy support to be successful within a housing system that doesn’t currently accommodate them.

In order to make community ownership models like social housing and community land trusts a reality, the housing movement needs to pursue policy changes and utilize legal tools. For example, development and preservation deals need to be structured differently in order to accommodate innovative aspects like resident ownership and permanent affordability. In addition, the regulatory framework must allow for these projects to occur and new strategic financial models need to be established. Measure ULA and Measure A (which is on the ballot) are poised to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in social housing and land trust programs in LA, but advocates need to be involved in shaping those programs.
This grant will support Public Counsel’s unique legal services to take the transformative ideas emerging from communities to change our inequitable housing systems and put them into policy and practice. Our attorneys will serve as policy advisors, supporting advocacy to create the conditions required for community ownership models. We will also provide legal advice on structures and frameworks to make these models a reality. We will provide this legal support to coalitions like ACT-LA, the CLT Coalition, the United to House LA Coalition, and the many groups that make up these coalitions. Public Counsel is currently the only legal organization in Los Angeles that has the expertise and skills to provide this critical movement legal support.

The housing movement’s long-term goal is a future in which 20% of LA’s housing stock - 684,500 units - is permanently affordable and community controlled by 2050. If we are successful, LA County residents will have expanded opportunities to live in housing they can afford, controlled by themselves or the community, in which they can live without fear of displacement. There will be dedicated government funding for social housing and land trust construction and preservation. Developers will understand the technical requirements for developing social housing and community land trusts (CLTs) and be able to meet those requirements. Residents will be able to manage and potentially own their homes. There will be a robust policy and legal framework to enable the scaling of community ownership projects.
The specific outcomes of our proposed project are that 50 coalition partners will have increased capacity to develop community-controlled projects and 100,000 residents will benefit indirectly.

Community ownership campaigns are in various stages of development in LA. The county has launched a land bank pilot; there is an expanding network of CLTs operating with success; and the county has helped 5 CLTs acquire 8 properties to preserve affordable housing for 110 people. And while social housing is new to LA, models exist across the world, such as in NYC and Vienna. Measures ULA and A will provide funding to expand all these models in LA. All of these efforts are supported by Public Counsel attorneys.
Our short-term success will be measured by the number of community-controlled units developed and the number of practitioners and operators who are empowered to use these new tools. Longer-term success will be the creation of a legal infrastructure to scale up the models and support hundreds of thousands of decommodified units that are affordable and community-controlled. Successfully implementing these projects in LA can be a model for national efforts as well.