Community control as a relationship between a place-based population and institution: The case of a community land trust

Introduction

Many activists and scholars have demonstrated a growing interest in efforts to collectively own and govern resources as alternatives to corporate models of resource distribution that foster increasing inequality around the globe. Worker-owned producer cooperatives, housing cooperatives, community credit unions, and community land trusts (CLTs) (along with numerous other collective practices) have been promoted by scholars as efforts toward “sustainable urban livelihoods” (Crabtree, 2008), the “ownership paradigm” (Imbroscio, 2013), development of the “community economy” (Gibson-Graham, 2006), “commoning” (Huron, 2015), and finally, ¹ “community control” (DeFilippis, 2003; North et al., 2002), a concept that this paper works to theorize further. For DeFilippis (2003), the utility in this concept is the local autonomy that comes from ownership of resources so that disadvantaged populations are no longer at the whims of global capitalism. The development of community-owned property can furthermore make noncommoditized resources more available, decreasing people’s dependence upon the cash- and credit-based economy to meet their needs, and reducing their power-laden relationships with banks, corporations, landlords, bosses, and other actors (Crabtree, 2008; Williams and Pierce, 2017).

The development and sustenance of these collective activities can be challenging, especially when economic resources to maintain them are scarce. CLTs offer particularly useful insight regarding the challenges of actualizing community control in the context of scarcity. The CLT model emerged out of the Civil Rights movement in the United States (U.S.) as part of a broader effort of the New Left to facilitate community control of local resources for disadvantaged populations. CLTs, usually operated by nonprofits (or sometimes, municipalities), acquire land and its associated development rights so that it can be taken out of the speculative market to serve low-income people. The unique land ownership model is most often used in the contemporary context to support affordable housing by reducing the influence of the capitalist housing market on property prices.

While the number of CLTs is expanding as the idea gains recognition, ² many CLTs are experiencing more competitive funding environments, especially in the wake of the Great Recession, which began in 2007. In the U.S., the U.K., and many other countries globally, the Great Recession has come with increased federal budget cuts for affordable housing providers (McKee, 2015; Sullivan and Power, 2013). The contemporary era of neoliberal policies and fiscal austerity has created an environment in which CLTs feel pressure to develop housing more efficiently to attract the necessary funding to survive organizationally. In this context, several long-term CLT proponents have articulated a concern regarding the disappearance of some of the foundational principles of CLTs in contemporary CLT discourses (see Davis, 2010; DeFilippis et al., 2018; Ronsenberg, 2013). Chief among these is the loss of the discourse around community control in the CLT model: the model is increasingly being perceived and promoted as tool to provide affordable housing, rather than an organizational approach that empowers disadvantaged people to take control of land (Crabtree, 2013; DeFilippis et al., 2018).

Questions regarding the forms community control takes and how to facilitate community control in the contemporary moment of neoliberal policies and fiscal austerity remain unanswered in the CLT literature. This paper develops a theory of community control as a relationship between a place-based population and an institution through a case study of Rondo Community Land Trust (RCLT) in Saint Paul, MN. RCLT originated in a single, disinvested neighborhood in Saint Paul. After experiencing many of the fiscal challenges faced by CLTs and expanding its service area to the county in search of new housing opportunities, RCLT opted to bring its focus back to its original neighborhood through development of a commercial land trust project, which was proposed by residents of the neighborhood. I begin by discussing the concept of community control and the challenges faced by contemporary CLTs in the following section.

Possibilities for community control of urban land through CLTs

Low-income populations face an urban situation in which their choices are severely limited: the neighborhoods in which they can most afford to live tend to be severely lacking in resources and amenities (Massey and Denton, 1993). Inadequate public spending on affordable housing and community development has meant that neighborhoods remain disinvested unless and until a private entity creates a profitable opportunity there, assuming that situated economic growth ensures improved welfare of residents (McFarlane, 1999). Often, development happens without direct or equitable participation of the resident population (Purcell, 2008). Even when neighborhood improvements seemingly benefit existing residents (with environmental cleanup, wider sidewalks, or new transit options), they encourage increases in property values that ultimately lead to displacement (Eckerd, 2011). As DeFilippis (2002: 149, emphasis added) writes:

[T]he problems in low-income areas spring not from a lack of investment or capital per se, but a lack of control over investment and capital. Poor people, therefore, seem to have the ‘choice’ of either living in disinvested areas, or being displaced by reinvestment when it does come unless they can gain control over the results of this investment.

The CLT model was originally developed in rural Georgia by Civil Rights leaders in 1969 to secure land for an African American agricultural homestead community in the face of rising land values and discrimination in lending practices (Davis, 2010). The first guidebook for operating CLTs was written in 1972 by some of the founders of model (Swann et al., 1972). The authors give an in-depth critique of the private property market in its unequal allocation of resources, specifically stating that the land trust structure could be used to enable low-income communities to “gain control of the development process in their own neighborhoods” (Swann et al., 1972: vii). CLTs typically focus on providing affordable housing through a model of shared equity where ownership rights for homes are separated from the land on which they sit. Equity from the property is shared between a CLT organization, which owns the land, and individual homeowners, who own houses and improvements on the land, leasing the land beneath. The homes on the land are individually bought and sold to qualified homebuyers at reduced prices, with ground-lease restrictions regarding household income, use, and the amount of equity individual homeowners can gain from selling. ³ Some CLTs also apply the concept to other uses, including rental housing, affordable commercial space, urban gardening, rural agricultural land, and neighborhood community centers (Rosenberg and Yuen, 2012). For Swann et al., though, the model is not simply a method of manipulating market values of property; community control of land is a foundational concept and essential component of the CLT model.

Political discourses promoting “community control” were prominent among activists in the Civil Rights movement, and their ideas proved to be influential in the development of the CLT model. According to Navarro (1998) and DeFilippis (2003, 2012), the modern concept of community control was born out of the Black Power and direct democracy movements of the 1960s and 1970s, becoming a rallying cry of the New Left (see Altshuler, 1970; Carmichael and Hamilton, 1967 for early discussions of community control). As DeFilippis (2003, 2012) and Navarro (1998) demonstrate in detail, community control has been promoted in a number of different contexts since that time without a coherent definition. While multiple and unfixed meanings can be advantageous in political framing and social movement discourses (see Williams and Pierce, 2016), the term, “community control” has also been variously used and vaguely defined in academic scholarship. ⁴ The incoherence of the term’s meaning as it is used in scholarship can make the goals, processes, and outcomes of community control unclear in analyses.

I follow DeFilippis (2003) and Angotti and Jagu (2007) in identifying community control as a place-based population’s collective ownership and decision-making power over resources (i.e. capital). Through this case study of a CLT, I develop a theory of community control as a relationship between a place-based population or “community” ⁵ and the institution (whether a formal organization or informal set of agreements and norms) that actualizes control of resources through a decision-making process. For a CLT, community control is concerned with a place-based population’s decision-making power regarding land through interactions with/in the CLT (the formal land owner). In the text that follows, I discuss the challenges CLTs face in practicing community control of land and then explore the conditions that shaped the community control outcomes in the development of a commercial land trust project through a CLT in the Rondo neighborhood of Saint Paul, MN.

Challenges for community control in CLTs

The scholarship on CLTs, while varied in its definitions of community control, identifies clear tensions faced by CLTs between their attention to local needs on the one hand and organizational sustainability on the other hand. CLTs tend to seek organizational sustainability through professionalization, growth, and appeals to funders, objectives that all manifest in tension with goals of community control (for more elaborate discussions of these tensions inherent in the CLT model, see Bunce, 2016; DeFilippis, 2002, 2003; Engelsman et al., 2016; Meehan, 1996; Rowe et al., 2016; Thompson, 2015). I discuss each of these three tensions in turn below.

The first tension that can arise in CLTs, as many scholars point out, emerges between CLTs' need for skilled professional support and their sincere commitment to the democratic involvement of low-income people in decisions involving CLT-owned land (see Bunce, 2016; DeFilippis, 2002, 2003; Engelsman et al., 2016; Meehan, 1996; Paterson, 1997; Thompson, 2015). Early in the development of the CLT model, the founders understood that professional expertise and connections to politically important actors would be necessary to the survival of CLTs (Crabtree, 2008; Institute for Community Economics, 1982; Swann et al., 1972). To invite wide-ranging support and a diversity of skillsets, the “classic” tripartite board structure for CLTs involves equal seats for three populations: the residents of CLT homes, non-CLT residents of the service area, and those representing the “public interest,” including local leaders in government, businesses, and other nonprofit organizations (Institute for Community Economics, 1982). DeFilippis et al. (2018) fear that many CLTs are seeking increased input from local elites disconnected from the social realities of low-income people to attract more funding and support. Further, the 2015 member survey completed by the National Community Land Trust Network found that only 59% of CLT respondents in the U.S. have a tripartite board that ensures decision-making power for low-income people (Thaden and Webb, 2015). Of course, even when CLT residents do hold decision-making power, they can feel intimidated sitting next to policy-makers and other professionals in board meetings (Meehan, 1996). Furthermore, the time constraints of low-income residents (who often work full time and take care of children) can limit their ability to be involved in decision-making (Moore and McKee, 2012). Because the board structure may at times disempower low-income CLT residents, Defilippis (2003) and Thaden and Lowe (2014) warn that CLTs that do not engage their residents sincerely and intentionally in decision-making run the risk of becoming service organizations of the shadow state.

The second tension discussed in the CLT literature is the tendency to pursue organizational and geographical growth, which can distract from CLTs' attention to local needs. The first CLT guidebook is clear that CLTs were originally created to each serve a specific place-based community (Swann et al., 1972) and much of the more recent CLT scholarship maintains an assumption that CLTs are (or should be) place based and neighborhood focused (see, e.g. Crabtree, 2008; Davis, 2015; DeFilippis, 2003; Rosenberg and Yuen, 2012). Still, most CLTs are growing to encompass entire cities, metro areas, or multicounty regions, with only 14% of U.S. CLTs in a 2011 survey reporting a service area of a single neighborhood (Thaden, 2012). This scalar evolution of the application of the CLT model has emerged partly in response to trends in the funding environment. Krinsky and Hovde (1996) were noticing the necessity for CLTs to constantly bring additional land into their control in order to attract funds to survive organizationally. DeFilippis et al. (2018) more explicitly address this tension, arguing that geographic expansion can reduce CLTs' ability to understand and represent particular place-based populations.

The two tendencies of CLTs discussed above (professionalization and growth) are precipitated largely by CLTs' dependence on external financial resources to sustain themselves organizationally, ⁶ which leads us to the source of the third tension: appealing to external funders. DeFilippis (2003) and Meehan (1996) bring up the important point that CLTs often feel a need to work closely with municipalities and private funders, which can discourage them from critiquing policy and organizing neighborhoods for structural change (DeFilippis, 2003; Meehan, 1996). The fiscal austerity due to neoliberal policies by the U.S. federal government, especially in response to the Great Recession, only exacerbates the problem. In the wake of the 2007 Great Recession, fiscal austerity in the U.S. and the U.K. has created an even more competitive funding environment for affordable housing organizations (Moore and McKee, 2012; Sullivan and Power, 2013). Because CLTs often have broader mission statements than other housing organizations, Krinsky and Hovde (1996) and Meehan (1996) warn that tighter budgets and strained organizational capacity can lead to a narrowing of CLTs' missions, particularly because participatory involvement of low-income people can take extra time and resources (see also Crabtree, 2013; Thaden and Lowe, 2014). Indeed, Stromberg (2016) shows how CLT advocates and practitioners have increasingly emphasized notions of perpetual affordability and subsidy retention ⁷ rather than community control and neighborhood empowerment in their promotional materials and mission statements in recent years. Thaden and Lowe (2014: 1), furthermore, note that even when community control is used in mission statements, it often “is not much more than a symbolic message.”

Discussions of community control hold a prominent place in the CLT literature, but CLT scholars and practitioners note that in practice, promoting community control remains challenging because of the necessity of professional expertise to advise CLT operations, the imperative to grow in geographic size, and the need for external funding to acquire properties and steward them over the long term. As long-time CLT proponent John Davis remarks in his 2010 piece, we are currently witnessing a “contest for the soul of the CLT” (p. 38). DeFilippis et al. (2018) strongly echo John Davis’s statement, explicitly naming community control as the fleeting soul at risk of being lost.

Case study: RCLT

While a number of CLTs are currently being developed by antigentrification activists in cities such as New York, ⁸ Detroit, ⁹ and Jackson ¹⁰ with explicit goals of community control, most of these efforts are comparatively young, reliant upon volunteer labor, and have not yet demonstrated long-term viability. Still unclear among all of these discussions and efforts is the meaning of community control: what types of community control can be achieved? What factors shape how community control plays out and how can efforts at community control be supported? These questions are important not just for CLTs, but for a range of alternative institutions that seek to collectively secure resources for the disadvantaged. The case of a CLT in Saint Paul, MN helps to begin to theorize the ways community control can take shape in the contemporary context of neoliberal policies and fiscal austerity.

In the Fall of 2014 and Summer of 2015, I conducted 33 semistructured interviews of RCLT’s board members, staff, and homeowners, as well as city officials who interact with the CLT, and local residents and activists in the Rondo neighborhood. This study is unique among CLT research in that it included CLT residents, neighborhood-based activists, and partner organizations as participants in in-depth interviews. I also observed three CLT board meetings and three orientations for interested homebuyers and collected archives from the CLT, interview participants, and the Minnesota Historical Society, including meeting minutes, pamphlets, news articles, and various studies and development plans regarding the Summit-University area.

My analysis focuses on RCLT’s planning of a commercial land trust project. At the time of publication, the commercial land trust project was in development, so the long-term effects on the surrounding neighborhood remain to be seen. The initiation and planning of the project indicate that community control is the result of the interaction of two entities: the “community” and the institution influence regarding those resources. I discuss the ways these factors influenced the type of community control experienced in the Rondo neighborhood through RCLT, first by introducing the characteristics of Rondo neighborhood and RCLT, and then identifying the ways the two entities interacted to produce community control in the planning stages of the commercial land trust project.

The Rondo neighborhood as CLT “community”

The first group of factors that I argue plays a significant role in the practice of community control over resources is related to the place-based population or “community” in question. This case study is concerned primarily with the residents of the Rondo neighborhood, the population RCLT was created to serve. The neighborhood’s history, cultural and demographic makeup, external influences, and level of civic organization, as detailed below, all influence the resulting community control.

In the first half of the 20th century, Rondo had one of the largest concentrations of African Americans in Minnesota, and was an epicenter for Black culture, with Rondo Boulevard being the commercial corridor that supported the surrounding residences (Sanders, 1995). In the 1960s, Interstate 94 was constructed along the former site of Rondo Boulevard, demolishing 90% of the neighborhood’s businesses and 750 homes, and cutting the neighborhood into two pieces (Cavett, 2005). The interstate effectively destroyed the livelihoods and community ties of countless other families, and the neighborhood ceased to exist in any form reminiscent of its former vibrancy. The area saw further disruption in the form of urban renewal projects and the loss of some of its middle class population, who fled to other parts of the Twin Cities. By the 1980s, the neighborhood was known for crime, drug use, blight, and vacant lots. Since the 2000s, the Rondo neighborhood has seen improvements in terms of cleanliness, safety, and a return of some of its former residents, as well as an influx of new residents.

In recent years, there has been increasing attention to the cultural history of the neighborhood, through events such as the Rondo Days community parade and fair (since 1982), the Selby Avenue Jazz Festival (since 2002), and its 2013 designation as an African American Cultural Corridor. The resurgence of interest in the historic Rondo neighborhood has occurred at the same time that the surrounding neighborhoods have witnessed major revitalization and growth. Despite some improvements in the last two decades, the Rondo area remains comparatively underinvested and was described by one research participant as the “hole of a donut” of surrounding development. The central business corridor of the Rondo neighborhood, a mile-long stretch of Selby Avenue, at the time of research, displayed empty storefronts and vacant lots while vibrant shopping districts were thriving directly to the south, east, and west. In response to the continued disinvestment in their neighborhood, a group of business owners and neighborhood leaders began the Selby Avenue Action Coalition (SAAC) in 2010 to promote business development on Selby Avenue. More recently, the opening of the new light rail line (the Central Corridor) in 2014 has prompted significant public and private investment half a mile north. Property values along the Selby Avenue corridor were (at the time of writing) comparatively low, and some local residents were concerned that high-end development might creep into their neighborhood and displace existing businesses. Housing prices and property taxes were already prohibitively high for many people whose families historically lived in the Rondo neighborhood, according to interview participants.

As explained in the next section, RCLT no longer limits its activities to the Rondo neighborhood (they now have CLT homes across the City of Saint Paul). Technically, then, (according to its bylaws) RCLT is responsible to the needs of many overlapping communities in Saint Paul. Still, the commercial land trust development is an initiative specifically intended to support the desires and needs of historic residents of the Rondo neighborhood. Neighborhoods are not concrete, neatly bounded areas with fixed populations, however. They are relational, constructed, and imagined (by their residents as well as their outsiders) in multiple, malleable, and never-coherent ways (Hankins and Martin, 2012; Martin, 2003; Pierce et al., 2011). The contemporary bounds and demographics constituting the Rondo neighborhood and community are variably defined by different actors and sources (some participants reported that the Rondo neighborhood ceased to exist with the construction of the interstate, while others reported clear, definitive boundaries to the neighborhood). One participant characterized the Rondo community in these terms, signally imagery broadly held among a diversity of study participants:

[I]t was a community and it still is a community that’s got a long history of African Americans living there and, you know, it’s a strong neighborhood and it’s changing. And the people who have lived there are losing their neighborhood. Yeah, and that’s been going on for a long time.

RCLT

The second group of factors that, I argue, contributes to the resulting characteristics of community control are related to the institution with decision-making authority over the shared resources. Depending on the framework used to actualize collective resource sharing, this institution might range from an informal set of agreements and negotiations between neighbors who share lawn maintenance machinery to a full-fledged nonprofit organization with governing bylaws (as is the case with RCLT). The institutional history, governing structure, and relationships with other entities (i.e. funders, policy-makers, and collaborators) all impact community control outcomes, as the case of RCLT demonstrates below.

RCLT was started by a task force of the Summit-University District Planning Council ¹¹ that sought to address issues of blight and absentee landlordism in and around the historic Rondo neighborhood. After several years of planning and research, RCLT was incorporated in 1993 to improve the quality of the Rondo neighborhood and aid its residents through affordable homeownership opportunities. The organization’s board is made up of equal parts: CLT homeowners, “community” members (residents within its service area), and open seats (typically leaders of sister nonprofits and other professionals with expertise in housing and community development). Inspired by the tripartite board structure outlined in the Community Land Trust Handbook (Institute for Community Economics, 1982), RCLT’s board invites participation not only from low-income CLT residents, but also the community of neighbors affected by development on CLT-held land.

The tripartite board structure ensures some involvement in decisions by residents of the CLT and its service area, but several scholars stress the importance of sustained engagement with residents and community members outside of board meetings as well to maintain the community orientation of CLTs (DeFilippis, 2003; Gray and Galande, 2011; Lowe and Thaden, 2016; Meehan, 1996). As Krinsky and Hovde (1996: 60) warn, “these structures only work as well as residents’ participation in them. If residents are unaware of the control they have in the organization, or if they don’t know how to exercise it, then the control remains a mere abstraction.” Gray and Galande (2011), furthermore, suggest that having a paid community organizer might be necessary for CLTs to maintain connections to low-income populations. RCLT’s capacity as of this writing only allows for one full-time staff person, and efforts at community organizing are not explicitly supported by their funders. As is typical among CLTs in the U.S. (see Lowe and Thaden, 2016), RCLT is not directly engaged with its residents and members in any sustained or systematic way beyond yearly newsletters. Still, the director of the organization serves on the board of several other neighborhood organizations, including SAAC, and has many personal connections in the Rondo neighborhood. Furthermore, at least four of the 12 board members at the time this study was completed resided in the Rondo neighborhood.

In the early 2000s, the City of Saint Paul was enmeshed in an affordable housing crisis, and, along with a few private foundations, asked RCLT to expand their service area to include the rest of the city. While the board was initially resistant to diverting attention away from the Rondo neighborhood that they were created to serve, they obliged, in part to sustain their funding sources, but also to begin meeting the needs of other populations seeking to buy homes in other parts of the city that were not yet served by any land trust. In 2006, they expanded their service area to all of Ramsey County, though land prices in the suburbs have been prohibitively expensive for developing land trust houses. As of 2015, RCLT’s portfolio included 48 single-family homes and two duplexes, nearly 40% of which are concentrated in the original Rondo neighborhood service area. RCLT’s expansion necessitated a wider organizational focus serving a broader area and population, meaning that the organization became less directly responsive to the Rondo neighborhood in the development of housing and resident support programming. Despite the growth of its scope, however, RCLT kept its original name and has maintained close ties with organizations and leaders in the Rondo neighborhood, as well as an office located in the Rondo neighborhood. RCLT is also the fiscal sponsor for SAAC, in which at least three RCLT board and staff members are directly involved as of this writing.

The decision to turn toward community-based desires for a commercial land trust development was inspired in part by a period of financial struggle for RCLT, necessitating a renegotiation of organizational purpose in order to survive organizationally. Like many nonprofit organizations, RCLT was severely impacted financially by the Great Recession of 2007. While RCLT saw their usual funding resources dwindling, in the most difficult parts of the economic recession, they additionally had to divert much of their staff capacity to dealing with the repercussions of the foreclosure crisis (by working more closely with homeowners threatened by—or experiencing—foreclosure, and negotiating with banks over foreclosed CLT homes to keep them in the trust), reducing their ability to add new homes to their portfolio. With fewer dollars coming in and an overburdened staff, continuing to focus solely on expanding their homeownership program was not a path that would sustain RCLT as an organization. In 2015, the RCLT board created a five-year plan for the organization that would respond to their financial situation and consider development options beyond their original scope. The board decided to reorient their work toward more multifamily and rental housing, as well as the commercial land trust project, a project idea that they had been researching and developing with Rondo neighborhood leaders for several years. The board also decided to reprioritize the diverse needs of residents Rondo neighborhood and to focus less on their attempts to subsidize housing in suburban Ramsey County, where high property prices and fewer funders made housing projects more financially difficult.

RCLT, which until now has focused on providing affordable homeownership opportunities, saw the development of a commercial land trust project as a viable way to reorient the organization during this difficult moment. Once construction is complete, the project will be a mixed-use development with affordable commercial space on Selby Avenue to support small businesses run by Rondo area entrepreneurs who might not otherwise be able to locate on Selby as property values rise. The development, which began construction in June 2018 after years of planning and fundraising, will involve two mixed-use buildings (on empty lots previously owned by the City of Saint Paul) with 34 units of affordable senior housing and 9300 square feet of affordable commercial space (Buchta, 2018). RCLT partnered with another affordable housing organization, Community Housing Development Corporation (CHDC), to use Low Income Housing Tax Credits to pay for the housing portion, and secured grant funding from local foundations and government bodies for the commercial portion (for more details see Buchta, 2018; Buechler, 2017). RCLT is partnering with a second organization, the Neighborhood Development Center (NDC), to provide entrepreneurship classes to people interested in applying for space in the building. RCLT will screen all commercial tenants, prioritizing local African American entrepreneurs living in and near the Rondo neighborhood. In in the next section, I detail the process of planning the commercial land trust to illustrate the way the RCLT and the residents of the Rondo neighborhood interacted to produce their version of community control.

The process of community control as it unfolded in Rondo: The interaction between the Rondo community and RCLT

The idea for a commercial land trust came out of personal conversations between RCLT staff and a board member who plays a leading role in SAAC and is intimately tied to many historic residents of the neighborhood through his local business. Recognizing the changing land values in the neighborhood and the potential for commercial gentrification on Selby Avenue, they began researching the commercial CLT in 2012 (though the idea was discussed before then) as a way to secure affordable commercial space for the local African American population. Regarding those initial conversations, one long-term member of RCLT stated:

Well I don’t remember the exact time, but I do—you know there were a lot of conversations with business owners about seeing gentrification or a change in what businesses look like coming in from both sides and really wanting to seize an opportunity to do that—to stay, basically.

As a SAAC member said:

We believe that it’s only a matter of time before folks start flooding this corridor because there’s a lot of cheap property that for a lot of developers may present a pretty relevant opportunity and so the challenge and the concern is that we see a lot of development that wouldn’t be necessarily led by the corridor, that it would be kind of turned over and kind of—probably not big-boxed, but that’s kind of the concern that there’s going to be that tipping point where just all of a sudden we see a huge wave of folks that start to buy up property.

As a participant from the City of Saint Paul noted:

We started thinking about okay, given the—you know—the stations, given the attention on University, um, what does that mean for Selby, right? So I think that’s what sort of spurred us to get to the SAAC table […] so the land trust, even though primarily a housing-focused organization, you know, was thinking about its role in helping to craft or develop a vision for this area.

Just as attention from developers and the City of Saint Paul was being directed to Selby Avenue, RCLT stepped in with a proposal that the neighborhood and City both endorsed. The commercial land trust proposal not only originated from a well-connected resident of the Rondo neighborhood, but it has been broadly supported by neighborhood organizations, residents, and the Summit-University District Planning Council. Though RCLT currently lacks the finances and staff capacity to engage in systematic community organizing, they have engaged area actors in much of the process of developing the project: RCLT notified residents whose property borders the project and held public meetings at the local coffee shop regarding the project to address their concerns. SAAC has been a prominent partner throughout the planning stages, and the boards of both SAAC and the Summit-University District Planning Council voted unanimously in favor of supporting the proposed use of the city-owned property. This support comes after a 2012 proposal to develop one of the lots in question was opposed by a large portion of Rondo residents. Many participants contrasted RCLT’s development project with the 2012 proposal:

There was a project who had a similar thought, the developer had a similar thought about developing those parcels, but didn’t get that community feedback, and so they were shouted down at a couple of meetings is what I was told in that the—they weren’t responding well to what the community was requesting. They had their own vision, and that’s—I think that’s how this idea of the land trust commercial space changes the conversation. It’s the approach that is not development for development’s sake or to enrich the shareholders. It’s about the involvement of community in such a way that more people benefit than just a few, so.

After the rejection of the 2012 proposal, RCLT and SAAC began talking to members of the Saint Paul City Council and Planning and Economic Development Department about their desire to utilize the city-owned lots on Selby Avenue for their project. In 2015, RCLT submitted a proposal for a $200,000 grant to fund a portion of the project, with letters of support from numerous neighborhood-based organizations, to Saint Paul’s notoriously competitive Neighborhood Sales Tax Revitalization (STAR) grant program, and won the award, to their own surprise. With matching funds from other sources, the Neighborhood STAR grant gave RCLT a boost of support that allowed them to initiate the next planning stage for the mixed-use project. The Neighborhood STAR Board, who reviews the grant applications, approved RCLT’s proposal in part because of RCLT’s history of involvement in the Rondo neighborhood. One member of the Neighborhood STAR Board spoke about how the failed 2012 proposal for development of the city-owned parcels affected RCLT’s grant application:

I think that that [the neighborhood’s rejection of the 2012 proposal] even moreso, from—at least from my standpoint, highlighted the need to make sure that someone who was community minded, right, had a good reputation in community, had good relationships, um, led redevelopment of the city-owned parcels of the area.

Conclusion

Community control, a concept mobilized in political as well as theoretical discourses to signal a place-based population’s decision-making power over local resources, remains an ideal with multiple interpretations of its meaning for practical applications. Like many alternative institutions for collective resource sharing, CLTs often face economic challenges that threaten their ability to foster intimate connections to the place-based communities they serve. These challenges have become more difficult with increasing fiscal austerity in recent years. However, RCLT’s experience demonstrates the possibility for community control of local resources (in this case, land), even in conditions of austerity.

RCLT responded to austerity with a proposal for a commercial land trust with explicit goals of increasing “community control” ¹² by Rondo area residents over commercial land threatened by gentrification. The development was initially proposed by an African American Rondo neighborhood business owner and resident, and planned as a collaborative process between RCLT and SAAC, the most prominent neighborhood-based organization at the time. The commercial CLT project is enabling a greater probability for future small businesses to have affordable space along the corridor, which could help maintain cultural amenities and affordable goods and services for the African American population, and cultivate local autonomy over capital (DeFilippis, 2003), toward what Crabtree (2008) calls “sustainable urban livelihoods.” Furthermore, the ongoing choice of tenants to occupy the commercial space will remain the choice of RCLT, and RCLT’s board structure leaves room for input from neighborhood residents and low-income land trust homeowners to weigh in on that ongoing governing process.

As their development of a commercial land trust illustrates, the characteristics of community control are the result of the interactions between two entities: a place-based population (or “community”) and the institution making decisions about those resources. Each of these entities has a broad set of historical and relational factors affecting their goals and abilities for community control. These factors are always changing and the relationship between the two entities is dynamic. As the case of RCLT illustrates, the resulting level—and type—of community control can, furthermore, ebb and flow through time.

The threats of gentrification, history of displacement, and types of social and political organization within the Rondo neighborhood have all shaped the outcomes for community control in relation to RCLT. With development surging on all sides of the Selby Avenue corridor, and the recent opening of the Central Corridor, the urgent need for strategies responding to gentrification became evident in the Rondo community (particularly in SAAC). The residents of this neighborhood in particular have a shared history of displacement by the development of Interstate 94, which remains a frequent topic of discussion, and deepens their desire to prevent further displacement. Without impending commercial gentrification in the Rondo neighborhood, the aspiration for a commercial land trust likely would not have been cultivated among members of SAAC, and RCLT likely would have chosen a different strategy to address funding shortages. The existence of a concerned group of neighborhood leaders furthermore provided a forum for the discussion of these problems and visions. The resulting plan may have turned out differently, and more participatory, however, if the neighborhood residents were more broadly organized around an antigentrification agenda. Instead, the resulting community control process was primarily undertaken by a select group of neighborhood property owners, and relatively elite-driven compared to the broad-based, grassroots type of community control advocated by Stoecker (1997).

The organizational history, structure, and social connections of RCLT also had significant influence on the type of community control that resulted. RCLT is an organization that began out of a neighborhood-based institution to address locally specific concerns. For its first decade as an organization, RCLT was specifically focused on the needs of one place-based community. Though RCLT eventually expanded its service area, disengaging partially from community control in the Rondo neighborhood, the organization retained ongoing relationships in the neighborhood. The staff and board’s long-term engagement with neighborhood-based organizations (like SAAC) and local residents allowed the concept of the commercial land trust to develop for several years in the background, even as the majority of the CLT’s housing developments were happening elsewhere. With reduced staff and organizational capacity, RCLT was not able to engage in traditional community organizing or grassroots activism, yet, their historical commitment to the Rondo neighborhood, social relationships within the neighborhood, and tripartite board structure allowed them to act as a vessel for the neighborhood resident-inspired idea for the commercial land trust to grow and become viable. RCLT is one of many CLTs in the U.S. that started in the 1980s and 1990s as part of locally specific efforts to improve urban neighborhoods that had been disinvested, protecting them from market speculation that could lead to gentrification (Davis, 2010; Thaden and Lowe, 2014). This case study suggests that even if this generation of CLTs has felt the need to expand their boundaries, they may still remain dedicated to their original service community and have an inclination to intervene in particular key moments in those areas.

While the factors above could have affected RCLT’s desire to engage more deeply in community control, RCLT’s organizational longevity and strategic relationships contributed to their ability to foster community control through the commercial land trust development. RCLT’s 20-year reputation as a provider of long-term affordable homeownership opportunities and steward of quality homes helped cultivate trust among stakeholders both in the neighborhood and city government, which aided them in gaining support for their commercial project. Additionally, their long-term connections with other nonprofit organizations, like CHDC and NDC, as well as city staff and public officials were essential to the development of the project. A younger, less-developed CLT would have more difficulty gaining the necessary support for such a development. Furthermore, SAAC, as a volunteer-run, relatively young organization, did not have the resources, social capital, experience, or institutional structure to develop a large mixed-use project on Selby Avenue. To make their vision a reality, they had to negotiate with—and work through—the CLT, the institution with the means to acquire land and begin a development for the benefit of the Rondo community.

This case suggests that a place-based population must be somewhat organized and motivated, and the institution with authority over the resource in question must be open to the participation of that population for community control to result. The type of community control is affected by historical factors, externally induced challenges, as well as social and organizational relationships and structures within both the place-based population and the institution of control. Future research on community control outcomes might explore different characteristic factors of populations and institutions working together for community control. For example, studies could compare CLTs (or other mechanisms of community control) that serve areas facing urgent threats, like gentrification, with CLTs serving areas with more stable property markets to assess the degree to which community control is cultivated through each CLT.

The development of a commercial land trust in the Rondo neighborhood is an enactment of community control of development of local land with regard to a population that has been disadvantaged in many respects. Still, the focus on the needs of the Rondo neighborhood by RCLT meant a de facto deprioritization of other neighborhoods in RCLT’s service area. The uncritical celebration of localism can obscure injustices that result, so it is important to note that community control is not necessarily an absolute good (Purcell, 2006). In the case of Saint Paul and RCLT, the needs of immigrant populations like the Hmong residents living in RCLT homes in other neighborhoods in Saint Paul were secondary to the needs of African Americans in the Rondo neighborhood. For metropolitan-scale organizations seeking to engage in community control of resources, the question of how to engage in broad-based community control spanning multiple communities may be worth pursuing in future studies.