Financing Community Control: Decommodifying Housing in the Entrepreneurial City

Keywords: urban geography, municipal finance, housing, political economy
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In recent years, municipal governments across the United States have aligned with efforts to cultivate community land trusts and facilitate their work to acquire and preserve land and housing within these cities. This growth in adoption of the mantle of community control comes at a time of increased enthusiasm for the community land trust model more broadly, with community land trust homeowners’ relative stability through the 2007-2009 financial crisis underscoring its promise as an anti-displacement tool, and several high-profile actions on both coasts lending national visibility.

Dedicated acquisition-preservation funds for community land trusts and related alternative tenure models have emerged as a key method of municipal support for community land trusts. Often called “small sites” or “preservation” funds, this capital is derived from a variety of sources, including reallocations of general funds, new tax initiatives, and bonds. The movement of capital into a dedicated fund creates the possibility of its deployment against displacement and for decommodification through the community land trust. This paper examines Oakland, California’s $600 million Measure KK bond, a small portion of which seeded the city’s first dedicated fund for community-controlled housing. A political economic analysis of the origins and destinations of this capital alongside its impact on the landscape of the city helps illuminate embedded contradictions in the entrepreneurial city’s alignment with calls for the decommodification of housing