San Francisco Community Land Trust:
Victory for Low-Income Tenants
April 4, 2006
By Tom Wetzel and James Tracy
Special to NPACH News
The Fong Building is a 21-unit apartment building in
Chinatown, on the edge of San Francisco's financial district.
The Fong Building tenants are mainly low-income Chinese
immigrants. For eight years the tenants have been locked in
an anti-eviction struggle. City College of San Francisco
bought their building with the intention of tearing it down
for a new campus.
San Francisco, one of the most expensive housing markets in
the United States, has more than its share of sad stories of
working-class people exiting the city their labor helped to
develop. However, thanks to tenacious community organizing
and nimble legal advocacy, tenants of the Fong Building have
saved their homes and are very close to collectivizing their
building.
This rare victory finally came on February 1st, with City
College selling the building to the San Francisco Community
Land Trust (SFCLT). SFCLT has an agreement with the tenants
to convert the Fong Building into a resident-owned,
limited-equity housing cooperative.
City College had abandoned its plans for a new campus on the
site back in 2005—the tenants' first victory. However,
the college planned to sell the building to one of
Chinatown’s largest for-profit developers who publicly
commented on his desire to raise the building and replace it
with a high-rise tower.
While tenants continued to mobilize, the Asian Law Caucus
threatened a lawsuit. These factors, combined with the fact
that the college couldn’t afford a fight over the fate
of the Fong Building while appealing to the public for
financing of other important expansion projects, contributed
to the sale of the property to the SFCLT for a price
well-bellow market rate.
SFCLT is a membership organization that advocates for
resident-controlled, permanently affordable housing. Resident
control is achieved through ownership of the housing by the
residents. However, the community land trust retains
ownership of the land under the building.
In “hot” real estate markets such as New York or
San Francisco, cooperative apartments have often evolved into
market-rate commodities. Market-driven housing inflation then
makes the housing unaffordable to working class residents of
the community. Land trust ownership of the land is intended
to prevent this. The residents have a ground lease from the
land trust. The ground lease enforces restrictions on resale
prices, thus protecting affordability.
In San Francisco, the land-trust was formed as many activists
tired of reactive short-term strategies. The CLT model was
appealing for several reasons: de-commodification of housing
was seen as part of a strategy to build gentrification proof
bubbles and a part of domestic “land-reform”
effort. The self-management aspect of CLTs provides a
counterpoint to the notion that housing must be owned by a
landlord.
"Land trusts" in the USA differ a lot among
themselves. Some are structured as a conventional non-profit.
Some are created by city governments, with government members
on their board of directors. An example of this latter type
of land trust is the recently created Irvine Community Land
Trust, which has been entrusted by the City of Irvine with
carrying out a very ambitious housing development program in
that city. The city of Irvine has provided initial staff to
get the CLT running.
Other CLTs, like SFCLT, are democratic membership
organizations that arose as grassroots initiatives. Many of
these are in rural areas or small towns. SFCLT is an attempt
to apply the grassroots CLT concept to a big city
environment. There are three categories of membership in
SFCLT: residents in buildings on SFCLT land, volunteers from
the community, and affiliation by membership organizations
that support SFCLT’s aims and values.
The organizing to form SFCLT began in 2001. An important part
of the effort has been developing relationships with groups
that organize tenants and fight landlords. In the case of the
Fong Building, the tenants are represented by the Asian Law
Caucus who brought the building to SFCLT to help realize the
aim of cooperative ownership. Another tenant organizing
group, St. Peters' Housing Committee, which organizes mainly
Spanish-speaking immigrant tenants, has a representative on
the SFCLT board of directors.
Since the victory at the Fong Building, several other
buildings have been brought to SFCLT as potential coop
conversions, either by housing organizations or the tenants.