By Brennan Labrie
New York City’s growing community land trust movement will hit a new milestone next month, as the East New York Community Land Trust is set to become the first in city history to purchase a commercial property off the private market.
The CLT will turn a vacant, two-story brick building into the “East Brooklyn Liberation Center,” a headquarters for the nonprofit with affordable office space for other local businesses and organizations.
The acquisition of this $2.3 million building puts New York City on the list of places where CLTs have transferred residential, commercial, and mixed-use property from the private market to the stewardship of local residents, joining the likes of St. Paul, Denver, and Oakland.
The East New York CLT works to preserve and expand affordable housing options in East New York and Brownsville, two working-class neighborhoods at the eastern edge of Brooklyn facing a rising affordability crisis and a wave of gentrification approaching from the west.
“Removing land from the speculative market is building power in the neighborhood,” says Boris Santos, the president of ENYCLT.
The nonprofit made waves in 2024 when it became the first New York City CLT to buy a multifamily apartment building off the private market. It’s currently converting the 20-unit building into a shared-equity housing cooperative.
The Liberation Center will allow it to achieve another central goal: not only keeping residents in the community, but increasing their economic stability and opportunities. The center will be designed to foster the growth of local businesses, nonprofits and worker cooperatives, Santos says.
The purchase was also necessary for the CLT itself, which had outgrown the coworking space it shares with another nonprofit. With almost 100 dues-paying members, meeting space was getting tight, Santos says.
“We are growing so fast, at such a tremendous pace, that we decided this space is not sufficient for us,” he says. The Liberation Center will let the nonprofit grow its base and its capacity to identify and purchase land.
“This community center will allow us to expand and go more full throttle on our work. You’ll be seeing us going after more and more buildings.”
ENYCLT borrowed its fundraising model from OakCLT, which has bought several mixed-use properties in Oakland, explains ENYCLT’s director, Hannah Anousheh.
ENYCLT secured over $1.5 million in low-interest loans from nonprofit lenders like the New Economy Loan Fund and The Working World; $250,000 in 0% interest investments from high-networth individuals; and is closing in on $800,000 in individual contributions. State Sen. Julia Salazar also committed $1 million to the project.
Public money moves slowly, though, so Santos’s team got creative with fundraising – even holding a dance party fundraiser at the Bushwick club Nowadays this spring.
A major milestone
Other CLTs in New York City have acquired property from the city itself. Cooper Square CLT acquired the land under 23 buildings in the Lower East Side in the 1990s and East Harlem El Barrio CLT purchased four buildings for $1 each in 2020. Some of these buildings contain commercial space, too.
But ENYCLT’s acquisition of a standalone commercial property off the market creates a model for how local CLTs can use collective land ownership to boost the local economy and increase economic opportunities, says Deyanira Del Rio, executive director of the New Economy Project. The organization coordinates the NYC Community Land Initiative, a coalition of New York CLTs and other mission-aligned organizations.
“It’s going to be a hub for cooperative economics and community wealth-building in a community that urgently needs it and has experienced waves of predatory lending, foreclosure, and rezoning,” Del Rio says. East New York and Brownsville, neighborhoods where Black and Hispanic residents make up over 80% of the population, have median household incomes far below the city average.
Recent city funding is making up for decades of underinvestment in these neighborhoods. A $146 million infrastructure project announced by the city last fall will connect the low-income Jewel Streets neighborhood to the city’s sewer system for the first time and fortify it against frequent floods — largely due to ENYCLT’s advocacy.
A 2016 rezoning created almost 6,500 affordable housing units, but much of it was built along one thoroughfare, and lots of recent construction had been on market-rate units, Santos says.
The Liberation Center, which Santos hopes will open within the next two years, could set a precedent for similar purchases by other New York CLTs soon, Del Rio says.
Western Queens CLT, formed out of the resistance to Amazon’s plan to build a headquarters in Long Island City in 2018, is submitting a plan to the city to reinvent the underutilized building offered to Amazon as the Queensboro People’s Space, a hub for local manufacturers, artists, vendors and even farmers.
“There’s been a real flourishing of this movement through policy and public and private funding support,” Del Rio says. “We’re going to see even bigger gains in the years to come.”
A new era for community ownership in NYC
The momentum reflects a resurgence of New York’s land trusts, which jumped from just two in lower Manhattan in 2012 to over 20 citywide today. This boom was partly spurred by the global financial crisis, when communities sought to protect local homes at risk of going into foreclosure, Del Rio explains.
ENYCLT itself formed at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when East New York’s housing crisis hit another peak, according to Santos.
The city’s CLT movements grew out of two eras of stark inequality — the late 1960s and the post-recession world, says John Surico, a Senior Fellow for Climate and Opportunity at the Center for an Urban Future.
As a “deeply flawed” housing market renders the city increasingly unaffordable, Surico foresees more CLTs and other local organizations springing up to reimagine housing and wealth generation in their community.
“There will have to be new forms of ownership, new forms of working and new forms of rethinking space,” he says. “A truly thriving city is one that has a diversity of ownership models.”
New York, home to one the country’s first CLTs in Cooper Square, fell behind other cities over the decades — but the tide is shifting, organizers and researchers say.
A culture of red tape is giving way to one of greater support for community land ownership, Surico says. “There’s an openness to having those conversations when before it was an immediate ‘no,’” he explains.
CLTs have secured millions in funding from the NYC City Council since 2019, and the new administration has expressed firm support for the movement.
The Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA), which would give qualified nonprofits an early bid on properties that hit the market, reached majority support in the city council shortly after being reintroduced last month. Mayor Mamdani has backed the legislation — which passed in December but was vetoed by his predecessor Eric Adams just before he left office — saying it is “about putting power back in the hands of the people.”
The mayor’s new housing plan, which announced a plan to create 200,000 units of affordable housing and preserve another 200,000 over the next decade, states a commitment to work with CLTs in advancing affordable and cooperative housing projects.
“We feel like we’re being heard by the mayor on many fronts when it comes to this plan,” Santos says, adding that he sees his organization’s work as a major driver behind these commitments.
“Without social movements, without that energy on the ground, there wouldn’t be any new policy.”