Dudley Street community land trust
A Boston neighbourhood that took its own vacant land into a trust and kept it there — separating the house, which can be sold, from the ground under it, which cannot.
- Place
- Roxbury, Boston, US
- Founded
- 1984–1988
- Status
- Enduring
- Duration
- c. 42 years and counting
What is held
Urban land. The trust owns the ground; the households own the buildings and hold the ground beneath them on a long lease.
Who is in
Residency in the neighbourhood for membership and a board seat; for a home, an income within the limits the trust sets and acceptance of the ground lease that comes with it.
Who decides
A board with a majority of neighbourhood residents, elected at open community meetings, alongside reserved seats for community agencies, businesses and religious institutions. The resident majority is written into the bylaws rather than conceded by custom.
How the rules are made
The board and the membership — but most of the operative rules live in the 99-year ground lease, which is where the resale formula sits. Changing the bylaws is easier than changing a lease already signed.
How cheating is caught
The ground lease monitors itself. The trust is a party to any resale and holds an option to purchase, so a homeowner cannot quietly sell at market price: the transaction cannot complete without the trust in the room.
The sanction ladder
- Notice of default under the ground lease
- A cure period, with the trust's assistance
- The trust exercises its option and buys the home at the formula price
- Lease termination and loss of the home
4 rungs, in order of escalation, for Dudley Street community land trust.
What happens in a bad year
The resale formula works in both directions: it caps the gain in a boom and it is why these homes were not the ones sold to foreclosure buyers in a bust. unknown — this draft has not checked the trust's own record through 2008 against that claim.
Notes on the account
Every other enduring arrangement in this gallery holds a resource against depletion. This one holds land against a market, which is a different problem with a surprisingly similar answer: define who is in, write down what they may do with it, and make the boundary cheap to check.
The mechanism is the split. A community land trust separates the building from the ground. You buy and sell the house; the trust keeps the land permanently and leases it to you for ninety-nine years. The lease carries a resale formula that limits what you may sell the house for, so the subsidy that made it affordable stays with the house instead of leaving with the first owner.
Dudley Street is also the case usually cited for something rarer: a neighbourhood organisation granted the power of eminent domain over privately held vacant land. That claim is on this page as a claim, and it is one of the things HC-014 is asked to confirm.
What is not settled in this draft
The dates are given as a range because two things happened: the neighbourhood initiative was founded in 1984, and the land trust that holds the land was incorporated later. Which of the two the header should call “founded” is a real question, not a typo. The acreage is approximate.
How to start one — Buying into a community land trust
- What it takes
- For a home: an income inside the trust's limits, mortgage approval from a lender that will write against a ground lease, and acceptance that the resale price is formula-set rather than market-set. For membership and a board seat: residency in the trust's area, which is a lower bar than buying and is the part most people skip.
- What it costs
- A below-market purchase price for the building, plus a ground lease fee that is typically nominal — often a token monthly amount. The cost that is not money is the resale cap: you give up most of the appreciation, which is precisely the mechanism that keeps the home affordable for whoever comes next.
- The legal form
- In the United States, usually a 501(c)(3) non-profit holding fee title to the land and granting 99-year renewable ground leases, with a tripartite board of residents, wider community and public-interest seats. Comparable forms exist elsewhere under different names — community land trusts in England and Wales have their own statutory definition — and the details vary enough that the local one is the one that matters.
- What usually goes wrong in year two
- Financing. The recurring problem is not governance, it is finding a lender who understands a ground lease and will underwrite against it, and finding a buyer's agent who does not advise the buyer against the resale formula. The second is that a resident-majority board only stays a resident-majority board if residents keep turning up to meetings.
Not yet checked by a practitioner
Sources
- Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood — Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, South End Press, 1994.
- The Community Land Trust Reader — ed. John Emmeus Davis, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2010.