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Community Wealth Blog

A new website, based on the research work of Rick Jacobus of Burlington Associates, who has served as a consultant for a number of community land trusts, and Jeffrey Lubell of the Center of Housing Policy, with financial support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, provides an important new resource for making the concept of “shared equity housing” accessible to community activists and policymakers.

Officially conceived at a meeting of community land trusts held in Portland in 2005 and incorporated in July 2006, the National CLT Network nonetheless represents a much older movement, one that is gaining increasing prominence as cities such as Irvine and Chicago have turned to community land trusts as a mechanism to preserve affordability in gentrifying markets. 

As Rosen notes, for some Wall Street types, particularly in the wake of the purchase of the Tribune Company (owner of the Chicago Tribune among other holdings), an ESOP may seem like a financing device too good to be true. First, because the ESOP is a pension plan, contributions to an ESOP to repay a loan used to acquire shares are tax deductible, both for principal and interest.  Second, if the company is an S-corporation and the ESOP owns 100% of the company, the company pays no federal income tax.

Well, if there is a silver lining at all in the sad aftermath of Katrina, it is that it has helped push issues of poverty in the United States back onto the nation’s political agenda. Last month, a task force of U.S. Mayors, headed by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, issued its Poverty, Work & Opportunity report.

As Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Palo Alto, CA-based Benetech and a member of the Social Enterprise Alliance board reports, one hot area of discussion at the 8th Annual Gathering of the Social Enterprise Alliance was whether new legal structures might assist social entrepreneurs in their efforts to develop socially oriented businesses.

Alabama has leveraged pension dollars to support economic development for decades, as a spate of recent press articles linked to the Pension Fund’s “What’s New” section attests. A March 31, 2007 article in the Birmingham News notes that pension fund CEO David Bronner “has long been known for strong opinions about economic development and has used the post he has held since 1973 as a bully pulpit.

The theme of the Spring 2007 issue of The Next American City is Green Building.  As Gregory Maher and Judith Turlock from LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation) note in one article, the “idea that sustainability is an appropriate and important goal for residents of affordable housing” is becoming mainstream.

An April 2007 article by Scott Bass and Chris Dovi in Style, a Richmond, Virginia, weekly, tells an interesting, if all-too-common, tale of gentrification abetted by government policy. As the authors explain, to spur inner city reinvestment, Richmond has given property owners tax breaks to improve any building that is at least 15 years old.

If nothing else, The Project for Public Spaces faux-newsletter, Faking Places, is an entertaining read. In its fantasy universe, the cover of Time Magazine declares “Placemaking” to be its “Idea of the Year” and the attached article surveys the “quiet revolution” sweeping America—from the formation of the Vaclav Havel School of Civic Affairs at Notre Dame University to the creation of the new cabinet-level Secretary of Neighborhoods office.

The Washington Post reports that federal regulators, at a recent Senate Banking Committee meeting, estimated that mortgages worth about $160 billion are now falling into delinquency. Is this predatory lending or just a few bad apples?

A related Tribune article written just before the deal was approved, outlines some key issues: As is often the case with mainstream press articles on employee stock ownership plan companies (ESOPs), the article goes through the laundry list of prominent ESOP failures—most notably United Airlines and Enron. Yet, as the article also notes: “about 1 in 10 American workers toils in a company where employees have an ownership stake, according to the ESOP Association.”