How a new tool can help existing neighborhoods welcome housing construction
As a young staffer in New York City government under the de Blasio administration, my role often took me to community engagement meetings. One sticks with me. It was a Saturday morning in East New York in January 2015; the City was laying out its ideas for the “East New York Plan,” an upzoning that would increase the amount developers could build in the neighborhood and, hopefully, spur neighborhood investment.
A man approached the microphone with a sentence that struck me: “I am a refugee of Williamsburg.”
He spoke of his former neighborhood, where his kids lived down the street from their grandparents and where rising rents ultimately forced him to leave. He said he felt powerless as he “lost” his community in the wake of the Williamsburg upzoning of 2005. City officials had celebrated the housing supply the upzoning generated and cut ribbons at new affordable housing developments, but no one he knew had gotten those celebrated units. His rent started to rise, and he ultimately moved his family to East New York, where they could live affordably.
Now he was scared the same thing would happen again.
That resident’s story captures what I believe is a broken social contract in America: Making your community better can sometimes lead to the displacement of the very residents who made those improvements in the first place. When this happens, it is rational for local residents to become skeptical of change — including changes that could actually benefit them over the long haul, like increasing housing supply.
This paradox persists because displacement — the process where residents involuntarily move away from a place due to the rising cost of living — is too often treated as an unfortunate and inevitable byproduct of housing development rather than a harm that is avoidable with careful planning and action. We need to flip this.
Fixing this paradox and preventing displacement requires, in large part, more affordable housing. But alongside more construction, New York also needs targeted antidisplacement strategies. As Vicki Been, head of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development during my time there, wrote along with Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine O’Regan, “New market-rate housing is necessary but not sufficient. Government intervention is critical to ensure that supply is added at prices affordable to a range of incomes.”
Neighborhoods where rapid development is taking place offer a unique window of opportunity. The political will to invest in these communities emerges precisely as market forces threaten them — opening up a narrow path where it might be possible to harness investment to build lasting community wealth and decision-making power.
The MINT model
I was part of a small team that founded Trust Neighborhoods, a nonprofit focused on empowering neighborhood-based organizations to stem displacement by building and preserving mixed-income housing, in 2020. The motivation behind Trust Neighborhoods was simple: In cases where residents are truly at risk of displacement, can we protect their ability to stay in their neighborhoods? How can we help original residents benefit from a greater share of economic opportunity even as their neighborhoods change? And is it possible to make neighborhood change less scary?
In short, we wanted to develop a tool kit to help ensure that increasing neighborhood opportunity generates positive opportunities for all, including those at risk of displacement.
The tool we developed is the Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust, or MINT. MINTs use community-governed ownership of mixed-income real estate to help ensure that neighborhood improvements benefit existing residents rather than displacing them. Since Trust Neighborhoods’ incorporation in 2020, we have created five MINTs: in Fresno, California; Denver and Aurora, Colorado; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Kansas City, Missouri; and Boston, Massachusetts.
The MINT is a vehicle to buy, develop and hold property in perpetuity. Community governance of the MINT happens in several ways. For each MINT, a group of community stakeholders defines the purpose to which the organization will be held responsible. This structure exists in other industries as well and is known as a “perpetual purpose trust.” (Well-known examples include Patagonia and Anthropic.)
Each MINT is overseen by a Trust Stewardship Committee — composed of a neighborhood-based organization, renting residents and other stakeholders — who are responsible for governing the trust in accordance with the Purpose Agreement. This crucially includes preserving affordability, preventing displacement and building community power alongside financial sustainability. The Stewardship Committee elects the board of the Operating Company, which, in addition to the neighborhood partner, renting residents and other stakeholders, often includes housing experts as well as a representative from Trust Neighborhoods.
Finally, each MINT has a general manager, which is the neighborhood partner; for example, in East Boston, this is the East Boston Community Development Corporation, or in Tulsa, Growing Together.
Each MINT seeks out investors, who will receive returns from rents in the portfolio of properties owned by the MINT. For example, the MINT in East Boston raised approximately $54 million from the City of Boston, foundation program-related investments and private investors.
In short, with this structure, the MINT aligns the interests of a diverse set of capital partners (federal, state and municipal subsidies; philanthropic investments; grants) with social and economic returns for incumbent residents — who benefit when quality, community-controlled housing that preserves affordability is built in their neighborhood.
Could it work in New York?
The East Boston Neighborhood Trust provides a good case study for how New York City could implement a MINT.
In 2022, Trust Neighborhoods partnered with the East Boston Community Development Corporation and City Life / Vida Urbana to acquire 114 units in East Boston. The goal was to preserve these apartments at a mix of income levels.
As Andres del Castillo, an organizer with City Life / Vida Urbana, explained, “We didn’t want our membership to just organize, fight for a new lease and in a year, be caught in the same situation. And that was what was actively happening to many, many, many of our members.”
New York City — where displacement and affordability have been reshaping the city’s identity and politics — is a particularly meaningful place to test the MINT model.
New York has the tools to do this: The Department of City Planning collects an impressive wealth of data, including the ability to proactively track building permits and certificates of occupancy, which show the path of neighborhood growth even before rent data can. This data can serve as a trigger to implement antidisplacement mechanisms like the MINT.
Beyond direct renter protections, the City should also look for opportunities to shift power to residents in neighborhoods undergoing significant development. For example, the City could expand the Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Program, which started in 1996 and matches tax-in-rem properties with residents from underrepresented backgrounds to rehabilitate and own them.
The housing challenges of gentrifying neighborhoods are complex. The MINT model, by itself, is not going to solve the problem of displacement or neighborhood disempowerment. However, the early returns from five communities suggest that MINTs can be an important piece of the puzzle. Healthy neighborhoods tend to incorporate many different forms of housing, from homeownership to cooperatives to market rentals. By helping to preserve affordability and creating a mechanism for local renters to exercise a measure of power over their neighborhoods, the MINT model has the potential to help drive a better kind of neighborhood growth in the days to come.