But getting that wealth, and leveraging it to benefit those families required preexisting wealth to invest, income growth, property appreciation, fair appraisals, and access to honest, market-rate capital. Since World War II, building wealth through home equity has provided enormous benefits for a largely white middle class. We Must Understand the Mechanics of Building Wealth.But sometimes it’s more subtle, and we have had to keep learning and adjusting, like when our organizing partners helped us understand that a particular group of renters in Oakland were more concerned with stability than affordability and were willing to increase their own rent to become Oakland Community Land Trust owners. If the problem the community is most concerned about is low-income homeowners facing increasing property taxes, building accessory dwelling units is a good fit creating a multifamily co-op is not. Community Must Frame What Problem the Model is Trying to SolveĬommunity ownership models could be a huge boon to communities of color-but only if the models focus on advancing the specific concerns of those community members they are intended to benefit.We don’t have an exhaustive tool detailing the ideal enabling context for each model, but here are some lessons SPARCC has learned about the process. While each of the groups SPARCC has worked with agreed that community ownership is critical to building wealth in Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color, the exact model that each city-or even communities within the same city-ended up selecting differed. These models operate in vastly different ways, require different contexts to be successful, and offer different benefits.
As a result of these ongoing conversations, we’ve put an extensive amount of time and energy into researching community ownership models, their benefits, and how they function. From the very beginning of our partnership in 2016, community partners and residents alike have shared a growing fear of displacement-and yearned for community ownership as a safeguard against these growing pressures. We invest in and nurture relationships with multidisciplinary groups that bring together community residents, public and private sectors, and local governments in each city. SPARCC has been working in six metropolitan regions for five years. My work with the Strong, Prosperous and Resilient Communities Challenge (SPARCC) suggests there is more promise in centering the communities we work with instead of trying to carbon copy “best practices.” Displacement of a community’s longtime residents continues to soar, and the median wealth of Black households sits at $23,000 in contrast to $184,000 for white households. And yet the transformational change we’ve sought hasn’t materialized. Photo courtesy of Northern California Land TrustĬommunity development has long made attempts at wealth building, with a focus on trying to find successful or innovative models that can be replicated.
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