Marking the Launch of a Community Land Trust for Sacramento

In Spring 2016, neighborhood leaders gathered at the Fruitridge Community Collaborative - the former Fruitridge Elementary, shuttered by Sacramento City Unified School District a few years prior - for a day to identify and select potential campaigns for the Sacramento Neighborhood Coalition. Conversations and tensions had long been growing in neighborhoods throughout the region, worried not only of growing homelessness but also of skyrocketing rents and home sale prices. It was clear that appropriate focus and funding would only result if community leaders joined together with a unified voice to pursue a common agenda. That day, the Sacramento residents present at that weekend convening decided to form the Sacramento Community Land Trust.

Housing challenges are not the exception, but the new norm. From Barcelona to Boston, East Los Angeles to Oakland, we are seeing the same troubling trend: the growth of our communities and growing income inequality will continue to drive home prices up, forcing middle- and low-income residents to the periphery, to consolidate in overburdened homes and apartments, or to the streets.

We cannot invest in infill or other community improvements without directly facilitating increased home values in our communities. The solution is not to stop investing or striving for healthy communities, but to do so with intention to protect the homes of current and future residents we hope will benefit from those improvements. We must also recognize the historic trends of discrimination because those same inequities are being replicated in today’s housing crisis and can only be defeated when we embed those voices in every decision we make.

Those interested leaders at that convening in 2016 have met dozens of times since, in small workgroups on Sunday evenings to larger group meetings on weeknights in community centers. The organization that has developed from that work - the Sacramento Community Land Trust, or SacCLT - is a braintrust of best practices and innovative ideas. We feel strongly that we are developing an organization that can nimbly and ably serve the communities we are hoping to help, working in partnership with other land trusts and affordable housing developers to provide an essential, permanent, community-led voice to a pressing problem.
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SacCLT is not the only solution to Sacramento’s housing crisis. We will only be successful with renter and homeowner protections to ensure residents don’t have to move because of financial limitations, and multiple strategies to ensure new home developments are attainable for buyers of all income levels. There is no one solution to this problem, but working together we believe that Sacramento can be a model for equitable community development.