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Beneficial but Not Transformative: Gentrification and Community-Building in the Cooper Square

Community Land Trust

Introduction

The United States faces a housing crisis today that in many areas of the nation is without

historical parallel. Even in a period of high inflation, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic housing

costs have skyrocketed and huge numbers of Americans spend more than a third of their income on rent.

Historically, the real estate market has experienced boom and bust cycles that put reliable housing out of

reach for many and incentivize real estate speculation, further inflating costs. Even established renters and

homeowners face the dual risks of gentrification and disinvestment as the market attempts to extract the

maximum possible value from land. Some attempting to resolve America’s complex housing issues may

propose adding to the housing stock, either generally or concentrating on affordable units. However,

proposals like this fail to check the fundamental structure of the real estate market and the problems it

creates for American society.

Not all forms of housing are entirely subject to market forces. Collective housing organizations

exist, and include both Mutual Housing Associations (MHAs) which collectively owns housing itself, and

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) which collectively own the land underneath the housing. This collective

structure prevents homeowners from gaining the traditional benefit of their house as an asset that pays

dividends, but in doing so removes the motives for speculative and exclusionary behavior by individuals

or large real estate corporations. Using a nonprofit board structure including representatives from both the

residents and surrounding community members, CLTs ensure housing is first offered to low-income

residents and frequently subsidizes their first purchases of homes. While the two often work together, this

paper interrogates Community Land Trusts specifically, and uses as an example the Cooper Square

Community Land Trust in New York City (Engelsman, Rowe, and Southern 2018).
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The Cooper Square Community Land Trust was first proposed by residents of the Cooper Square

area in response to a proposed gentrification plan from Robert Moses and the city government in 1959.

The proposal would have bulldozed a huge area, displacing 2400 people. In response, the community

introduced a counterproposal that included rebuilding and emphasized affordable housing for new units.

The plan was only officially approved twenty years later, and forming the official CLT (and its

accompanying MHA to manage buildings) was not complete until 1991. Today, the Cooper Square CLT

owns twenty-one properties that hold over 300 residential and more commercial units, all of which are

classified as affordable units by New York City (Agnotti 2011).

Literature Review

The question of whether community land trusts are useful tools to address the many crises caused

by private land ownership and property markets first requires an understanding of the purpose and

possibilities in city planning. Planning is defined by Samuel Stein as “the way we shape space over time”

(Stein 2019). This umbrella includes the current mainstream philosophies of neoliberal planning and

rational-comprehensive planning which, while they differ on the level of state involvement they endorse,

both agree the purpose of planning is largely profit maximization and must be led by experts, not

communities (Angotti 2011). A decade of this planning philosophy has coincided with skyrocketing rents

and declining homeownership rates, even as the housing market has continued to accumulate value and

pay dividends to wealthy investors (Stein 2019).

To combat this, opposing theories of city planning have developed, with varying views on the

magnitude of transformation needed to address these crises. Progressive planning reforms often attempt to

balance profit maximization with affordability, requiring some new developments to include affordable

units and rezoning areas to incentivize housing production. However, these reforms fail to challenge the

presumed neutrality and superiority of planners themselves (Stein 2019). City planners under progressive

planning are still tasked with being the main or sole decision-makers for communities in which they do

not live. Advocacy planning, on the other hand, argues decision-making should be centered in the
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communities who are facing development (Angotti 2011). This approach must constantly contest what

Stein refers to as the “capitalist-democracy contradiction” inherent in city planning. This contradiction

stems from the requirement that any functional democracy include citizen participation in decision-

making and the reality of overwhelming power of capital interests at every level of that process (Stein

2019). This contradiction illuminates both the benefits and drawbacks of the CLT model as a way to

immediately combat problems in housing affordability and challenge fundamental problems in market

housing overall.

A now substantial body of literature substantiates the claim that CLTs are effective at promoting

and sustaining affordable housing. Theoretically, CLTs are able to “lock in” housing subsidies for

homeownership that would be lost if directed at a singular buyer, as their agreements with the

homeowners who lease CLT land almost always require either CLT approval of the subsequent buyer,

first right of purchase within the CLT, or resale to a qualifying low-income buyer, dramatically increasing

long-term affordable housing stock (Engelsman, Rowe, and Southern 2018, Mironova 2017). Empirical

evidence shows a wide range of follow-on affordability benefits from this “lock-in” effect. Nelson et al

(2020) use complex modeling to argue that CLTs improve the resale value of nearby housing outside the

CLT (combatting any argument that such programs “reduce property values”) while CLT property values

increase more slowly than citywide ones, indicating continuing affordability. More dramatic is CLT rates

of foreclosure, which at the height of the post-2008 housing crisis was as small as a tenth of general rates,

without controlling for the on average lower-income of CLT homeowners (Thaden 2011). These occur

while simultaneously allowing CLT home sellers to still benefit from homeownership as financial

investment, with one study showing mean annual rate of returns over 30 percent, even as sellers only

accrued a fraction of profits from the private market (Lauria and Comstock 2007).

These benefits for affordability, while dramatic, don’t describe the effect of CLTs on the ideology

of private homeownership itself, the foundation of the housing market and affordability crisis (Stein

2019). CLTs are a way to socially disconnect the benefits of no longer renting (stability, security, privacy)
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from the private housing market, especially for those for whom renting would be the only other option

(Martin et al 2020). Multiple studies describe both prospective and current CLT participants as attracted

to the model because of its way of “giving back” to the community; the option to sacrifice individual

profits to promote affordable housing, when offered, was chosen (Thanden et al 2013, Martin et al 2020,

DeFilippis et al 2019). Because of the strong history of community control in CLTs, they also frequently

strengthen neighborhood ties and housing activist movements, as Williams argues in her study of the

Rondo CLT (Williams 2018, Mironova 2022). CLTs, as opposed to struggles against deregulation, are

expansionist in nature, in that they actively dismantle housing unaffordability instead of attempting to

slow its progress (Mironova 2019). However, the CLT model fails in many instances to challenge

fundamental assumptions of capitalism within housing. As CLTs continue to expand their numbers and

properties nationally (DeFilippis et al 2019), the model faces limitations in accomplishing the most

expansive goals of urban activists.

From a critical perspective, CLTs, as still embedded in the housing market, do not contest the

idea that homeownership should produce some financial incentives, limiting any truly radical

transformation of the current housing system. On the other hand, both prospective and current residents

express reservations about restrictions on resale and centralized authority under the CLT system,

illustrating how the valorization of individual property ownership possibly pose continuing threats to the

CLT model. Additionally, some writings have sounded the alarm about the potential erosion of

“community control” as both legal architecture and subjective experience of residents. This problem is

likely to expand as CLTs proliferate and expand their territorial bounds, courting private and institutional

stakeholders to do so (Williams 2018, DeFilippis, Stromberg, and Williams 2018, Greenstein 2007).

These new, more technocratic, less participatory CLTs prove they can be transformative to capitalist ideas

of housing not inevitably, but “for those who want them to be” (DeFilippis et al 2019).

Methodology
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To attempts to understand the effect CLTs have on their surrounding area in both classical

affordability terms and broader community control ones, first the CLT properties themselves must be

mapped. After acquiring a list of addresses for Cooper Square CLT and MHA owned units (D. Powell,

personal communication, November 7th, 2022), I found that all but two of the 21 properties were located

in the same Census Block Group and decided to use that area as my basis of comparison to the

surrounding neighborhood. The “surrounding neighborhood” here was measured by all block groups

within a 500-foot radius of the CLT-prevalent block group, creating a data set with over twenty properties

for comparison. I also wanted to measure possible gentrification in the area, and found research arguing

for the merits of combining information about race, education, income, and property value (Maantay and

Maroko 2018, Galston and Peacock 1986, Pries et al 2021, Easton et al 2020). American Community

Survey data (United States Census Bureau 2022) tracks many more characteristics of neighborhoods on a

much granular level, but has poor data on factors like property value. Data on property values from a

different source might cover a different possible time period (ACS data is collected and aggregated in a

five-year window, making ACS 2014 estimates distinct from a 2014 snapshot from another source), so I

used median rent payments to estimate the possible value extracted from renters. The New York City

Planning Department Data supplemented here as well, providing point data on where construction and

demolition projects were completed and information on the net change in “Class A”, or Market-rate

apartment units those projects led to. This “Class A” change was also used as a possible indicator of

gentrification, representing real estate investment in the area.

City planning data also helped represent the more nebulous question of how CLTs were able to

keep neighborhoods coherent and activated in local life. Construction and demolition projects frequently

included changes to housing units but also included the destruction or creation of commercial

establishments or other local places, creating a rough marker of the amount of drastic change everyday

people would see in their neighborhood. ACS mobility data was also used to attempt to express this,

quantifying the proportion of the population that moved in the previous six months and explaining
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population turnover in the district. While both of these are very general approximations and nowhere near

the whole story of the community elements CLTs are intended to provide, they are appropriate metrics to

begin asking what benefits CLTs might have for their residents and neighbors.

Results

The prevalence of CLT properties coincides

with slightly more construction and demolition

projects (6 to the surrounding area’s average of

4.9) but decidedly lower mobility per capita.

Figure 1 indicates the key block group had

mobility per capita declining over 50% over

the ten-year period, even as the district was in

the lower end of measures in both periods

(2009-2014 and 2015-2019). This means that

the mobility rate in this area was low and

declining when compared to the surrounding

area, even as there were construction and

demolition projects present. The prevalence of

Figure 1: Neighborhood Changes. Data used includes American
construction
Community andand
Surveys demolition projects
NYC Planning was also
Department figures with
changes measured from 2009 to 2019.
higher in the areas immediately surrounding the CLT-prevalent area with low outliers of zero or one

projects completed mostly on the outer edges of the area measured.

The results when attempting to measure gentrification in the CLT-prevalent area and the

surroundings are in contrast very mixed. It’s clear that the block group in question had clear increases in

the Black population per capita (Figure 2) and a decrease in median income per capita, although not as

dramatic a decrease as some of the areas to its immediate east (Figure 4).
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Figures 2-5: Representations of Gentrifications, from left to right,

top to bottom. Data used includes American Community Surveys
and NYC Planning Department figures with changes measured
from 2009 to 2019.
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However, it also saw severe increases in the population of residents with Bachelor’s degrees (Figure 3)

and increases in median rent prices (Figure 5) indicating some changes to the demographics of the

neighborhood are occurring and rent is going up. Finally, these maps do illustrate the ultimate result of

the prevalence of construction and demolition projects indicated earlier was not a dramatic increase in the

number of market-rate units available in this area, indicating this block group (in contrast to its immediate

neighbors to the north and south) is not a target of large real estate investment and therefore possibly not a

target of intense real estate speculation. These factors prevent these maps alone from being adequate

measures of the relationship between CLTs and gentrification. They provide some evidence in a vacuum

that CLTs prevent gentrification, but to fully understand the CLT ultimate effect, it must be compared

more directly to areas surrounding it.

Comparing the statistics for the entire dataset to the statistics for the dataset without the CLT

prevalent district did not yield more useful information. The differences between the values in all cases

were well below the standard deviations, indicating the absence of the CLT has little effect on the broad

demographic trends of this area of Manhattan. While there is some evidence to indicate that specific

subsections of this area may be experiencing gentrification (the area immediately to the west of the CLT

seems to contain more indicators pointing in the same direction), without a theoretical framework for

differentiating those areas from their surroundings, there’s no reason to assume specific areas would be

undergoing more aggressive gentrification than their immediate peers.

Conclusions and Future Research

Gentrification is a complex and nonlinear process that includes several disparate factors from

demographic changes to economic development of an area. Community land trusts broadly are key tools

for housing affordability for those they serve. They also can create closer community bonds and connect

residents to each other and key resources. Geographic analyses of the Cooper Square Community Land

Trust indicate it is to this day accomplishing some of these goals for its residents and neighbors. Mapping

properties held by the Cooper Square Community Land Trust illustrates markedly lower rates of mobility
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in the immediate area, indicating the community population is more stable over time, even as it’s also

clear that construction and demolition projects that transform CLT residents’ immediate surroundings are

still common. The area is also associated with increases in the Black population and decreases in the

median income of residents, signs that point in favor of the area seeing less gentrification than its peers.

However, complicating factors like its dramatic increase in the college-educated population and rises in

rent prices indicate the CLT is not a silver bullet for preventing changes to the neighborhood from

occurring and materially disadvantaging residents.

Future research opportunities to construct a clearer picture of the benefits of the Cooper Square

CLT abound. As some factors like median income changes seem to be more dramatic the greater distance

away from the CLT prevalent area, a geographic weighted regression might indicate some specific

causality that the broad graduated colors analysis is missing. Additionally, more granular data in terms of

ACS census blocks used in such a weighted regression might give more specific information within the

wider CLT prevalent block group, determining if the CLT has a larger mitigating effect on gentrification

in the immediate area than the larger one. Additionally, while mobility data shows a positive effect of the

CLT, more data on the true benefits of the community could still be gathered. For example, many CLTs

provide residents information on access to government benefits like food stamps or rental assistance.

Additionally, the Cooper Square CLT specifically has a history of association with activist movements in

the area, specifically tenants’ rights struggles, and it could be useful to determine if it continues to have

that effect today. This project also uses large government data instead of testimonials from residents, and

future projects might get a much better sense of the community created by the Cooper Square CLT by

asking residents if they feel like the CLT supports them and creates a stronger community in the Cooper

Square area. Finally, concerns about the community-creation aspects of CLTs are most prevalent in

critiques of newly created CLTs, including those endorsed or run by city governments. Comparison

between Cooper Square, one of the oldest and largest metropolitan CLTs, and others just beginning, could

provide a clearer contrast and possibly emphasize some of the benefits of an established CLT.
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Community Land Trusts are a valuable tool to resist the encroachments of the real estate market and its

negative effects on homeowners; researching the particular benefits of them in more depth is a worthy

goal in advocating for their continued proliferation.

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