It’s Time for Funders to Put Their Money Behind Community Ownership
Mike Pollio, Will Delaney, Dawn Phillips & Lorraine Deguzman Op-Ed March 17, 2025
Housing is a human right, yet in the U.S. today, affordable housing is further out of reach than ever. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a full-time worker earning minimum wage cannot afford a two-bedroom rental in any U.S. state.
This crisis demands more than incremental solutions—it requires a fundamental reimagining of housing as a community resource, not a speculative asset. Today, with the federal government making drastic cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development that are sure to deepen our housing crisis, we’re calling on funders to join us and keep housing affordable – and in the community’s hands.
Read more: HUD Is Withholding Billions in Homelessness Funds. These People’s Lives Are Already Changing.
For decades, housing policy and market forces have prioritized profit over people, leaving low-income families, communities of color, and working-class households struggling against displacement, gentrification, and rent spikes. It’s time to rewrite the rules and move toward a housing model that serves people, not investors. This administration shows us limitations of and potential to politicize grant funding.
Our organizations know that today, more than ever, we cannot expect consistent public funding. We need to double down on our support for alternative, community-stewarded projects that are springing up in some of the most under-resourced communities across the country.
For a year, we came together as The Kresge Foundation’s grantees, in an Advancing Health Equity through Housing learning community to explore questions of community ownership as a pathway to healthy housing. (Disclosure: Next City receives funding from The Kresge Foundation.)
Our organizations are working across housing justice, health and policy to engage funders and decision makers for housing solutions. Together, we are amplifying community-led housing initiatives that build affordable, stable housing and empower residents to take ownership of the spaces they call home.
Community ownership is not just a housing innovation – it’s a solution for decades of housing failures. It’s a community-stabilizing model where residents, rather than developers or investors, control their neighborhoods directly, instead of the profit-driven housing market. It enables local capacity to acquire land or housing with support from local organizations and funding partnerships, and benefits everyone by ensuring stable, affordable and healthy housing that directly strengthens communities and builds a social fabric across divisions and rooted in place. This means neighborhoods benefit in the long-term too.
Across the country, these models are working. Land trusts are providing the same solutions of conventional affordable housing, like cost and non-discrimination, combined with the rootedness and sense of community of a place-based governing model through direct participation and self-governance.
In New Orleans, Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative used a community land trust to support a mother and her daughter, who had spent years couch-surfing and moving from hotel to hotel, to finally be able to settle in a two-bedroom apartment. Today, the mother has a stable job and her family enjoys the safety and security they need to flourish. She is on the resident board, further rooting her in place, and in a critically needed community. This is the power of housing stability: it gives people a foundation to build healthier, more connected lives.
Read more: Affordable Housing’s Forever Solution
Community ownership also offers pathways to racial justice. Charlottesville-based Piedmont Housing Alliance developed a partnership to convert private properties into community assets, giving four Black families with low-incomes the chance to own their homes affordably.
The organization worked with investors and local leaders to finance and secure these properties, ensuring their lasting affordability and preventing displacement. As a result, families in the city’s historically Black Fifeville neighborhood can put down roots without risk of displacement and build community wealth, free from the pressures of the speculative housing market.
Right to the City, a national alliance dedicated to fighting displacement and gentrification, demonstrates these values in action. In the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Westwood in Denver, Colorado, residents of a manufactured home park organized themselves with support from local grassroots organizations, 9to5 Colorado and Justice For the People Legal Center, to purchase the land on which their 78 manufactured homes stand from the original owner.
Right to the City partnered with their local groups to support the residents in their acquisition of the site to transition it over to a community stewarded cooperative where the residents of the park make the key decisions over their homes. This transition in ownership was a victory for the residents of the park and represents a successful model that demonstrates how collective ownership can protect residents from housing insecurity and destabilization.
Funders, philanthropies and other supporters play an essential role in making these models possible. Through strategic investments, advocacy, and resources, they help fuel the community-centered housing movement. We lift up the visionary funders like Kataly Foundation, who provided $20 million to the Sogorea Te Land Trust, an organization working to return land to Indigenous communities, or Kresge, who funded critical housing sector learning and convening work. This type of support builds capacity within communities, enabling them to govern their housing and land sustainably.
Watch our webinar: Where Indigenous Land Return Is Already Possible
Even robust affordable housing organizations see value in partnerships with land trusts. Minneapolis’ Hope Community forged a strategic partnership with the City of Lakes CLT, housing their community not just in affordable rentals, but in permanently affordable housing they truly own. Hope sees CLTs as an important part of their multi-pronged housing justice strategy, and funders can too.
This work is not new. In 1984 Boston, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative’s land trust secured 228 families in permanently affordable housing, thanks to visionary city leaders using the right policy at the right time. Through eminent domain, resident organizers aptly took on blight and disinvestment with a community-controlled vision and plan. They are multiracial, organized and 3000-members strong, because of wise investments in community owned housing.
By directing resources toward community-led housing projects, we can bring about a new era of affordable, equitable housing that prioritizes people over profit. Key investments such as general operating support and land acquisition capital can be transformative for new housers and legacy developers alike. These investments, offered at the right time and the right size, catalyze an alternative to the affordable housing status quo.
We urge all funders to support this community ownership movement. Let’s turn the tide on decades of housing injustice and help build a future where every person has a safe, healthy, and truly affordable place to call home