In What Would it Look Like to Win?, Rick Jacobus’ May 6, 2015 post on Rooflines, the Shelterforce Blog, he writes:
We should not have to pay for [affordable] access more than once. We should own the land... In every part of the country public and nonprofit agencies are investing in rental and ownership properties that will remain permanently affordable. But there is a tendency to see this as “just one approach” among many. Surely economic mobility is just one goal of our housing policy, but when we talk about promoting economic mobility, we should focus our attention on the only strategy that can actually win: building a geographically distributed stock of affordable housing that is permanently controlled by a public or nonprofit agency.
This view of affordable housing parallels Equity Trust’s approach to farmland preservation.
Read the full post here.
Rick Jacobus is a national expert on inclusionary housing and affordable homeownership, including through Community Land Trusts. He was the founder of and currently serves as a consultant to Cornerstone Partnership, a national initiative focused on building more inclusive communities.