By Tom Wetzel
53 Columbus Avenue is a 21-unit apartment building on the edge of San Francisco's financial district. The tenants -- mainly low-income Chinese immigrants -- were locked in an anti-eviction struggle with City College of San Francisco for seven years. City College had bought the building with the aim of knocking it down for a new campus.
In November 2005 City College was concerned to get the voters of San Francisco to approve a $200 million bond issue. This made City College politically vulnerable. A messy anti-eviction protest was the last thing City College wanted. This led to a negotiated settlement. On May 1st 2006, San Francisco Community Land Trust (SFCLT) (www.sfclt.org) became the owner of the building. The building was purchased with the aim of converting it into a tenant-owned housing cooperative, with restrictions that will maintain affordability of the housing in perpetuity. This SFCLT victory came on the heals of five years of organizing. With the backing of numerous community groups, SFCLT was also able to get the city council to set up a $1 million seed fund last March, providing grant money to finance this and other coop conversions. Since the victory on Columbus Avenue, SFCLT has begun working with residents in a number of other buildings to do coop conversions.
SFCLT was formed to carry out a strategy of collectivizing rental buildings occupied by working class residents. The SFCLT program promotes self-management in two ways. First, the residents control the buildings, typically through some form of collective ownership. Secondly, the community land trust retains ownership of the land under the buildings. This enables the community to enforce resale restrictions on prices of apartments, preventing conversion to market-rate cooperatives -- a problem that has beset housing coops in New York City, San Francisco and other cities with "hot" real estate markets. As a democratic membership organization, the community land trust is a vehicle to socialize ownership of the land independently of the government.
The working class community has an interest in keeping housing as inexpensive as possible. The community land trust approach uses ownership of the land under buildings as a way to ensure this. The residents have a ground lease that embodies permanent price restrictions and protects the community's social interest in the housing. In this sense, the community land trust is a counter-market strategy. At the same time, the membership of multiple resident-controlled buildings in the community land trust enables the land trust to act as a mutual aid organization, to provide guidance against problems such as being taken advantage of by unscrupulous property management companies or building contractors.