With our team’s focus on the size and urgency of work ahead, we can sometimes lose sight of just how much has happened in this past year. Mixed-income neighborhood trusts (MINTs) transitioned from a dream of residents facing gentrification to a reality. Two are now up and running, each with over a dozen properties, engaged boards and residents, and their own cultures. The updates keep coming: a long vacant house restored in KC, more renting families protected in Tulsa, neighbors suggesting new priority properties. We’re proud of what we have accomplished together with our partners and enormously thankful for their support and passion.
However, we do remain focused on the work ahead. This will involve Trust Neighborhoods growing capacity, securing capital for existing and additional MINTs, and scoping MINTs with new neighborhood partners across the country.
We’re heartened by the impact to date, and the many, many residents and partners who are part of this work to change what’s possible in American neighborhoods.
Updates
The first 25
MINTs now have more than 25 units of housing in community control. These include six units in Tulsa where we know the other buyers were going to kick out all of the mostly BIPOC renting residents. These include vacant houses that have destroyed value for nearby BIPOC homeowners, and these are all going to be quality units at a mix of incomes that mitigate displacement and are accountable to their neighborhoods. They added another property just this morning.
A vacant house renovation underway (above) and nearing completion (below) by the Lykins Neighborhood Trust
Fund & Arnold Ventures
New neighborhoods continue to reach out about setting up their own MINTs. Behind the scenes, our team has been working hard to ensure that any neighborhood has ready access to sufficient capital. Arnold Ventures is generously supporting our design of a fund to provide smoother access to capital for neighborhoods and a national vehicle for MINT investors. We’re beginning to reach out to advisors on this fund design process and are always welcoming suggested expertise and partners.
Housing Lab
We’re now several months into being part of the Terner Center for Housing’s Housing Lab, and just had a three day leadership session in the Bay with our inspiring peers at Blackstar Stability, LA Room & Board, True Footage, and Impact Justice’s Homecoming Project. It was great to find people who want to stay up late hashing out housing law, finance, and deeply impact driven work. We want to add a special thanks to Carol Galante and Michelle Boyd who have built a special and promising institution and community for new social ventures in housing. We took away a lot to process; here are just three learnings that we are actively working through now:
Contract-for-deed
The MINTs have run across terrible predatory contract-for-deed properties being sold in their acquisition work, and have stayed away from them, but Blackstar Stability is working with residents to replace these contracts with real homeownership. We’re hopeful that MINTs may be able to partner with Blackstar Stability to help residents get out of these predatory contracts and transition into real homeownership.Data
We were inspired by the inputs into True Footage’s appraisal model to build on our current sources and uses of data in identifying, underwriting, marketing, and evaluating MINTs. To support us with this process, we’re looking to hire a winter/spring part-time or summer full-time Data Scientist. JD is here. This could be perfect for a current data science masters student who wants to help Trust Neighborhoods better use data to support neighborhoods with their own real estate ownership vehicles.Federal policy
While we know that federal policy has the potential to meaningfully accelerate the work of MINTs and other comparable models, to date, we’ve been exclusively focused on getting our pilots off the ground with non-federal sources of capital and support. Carol Galante encouraged us to be more opportunistic with federal dollars, especially with cities and states finally receiving overdue resources for this impact in housing and community development. We will look to more actively incorporate these dollars and programs into our existing work.
Our Housing Lab cohort came together in the Bay in November
Impact and evaluation
Our team cares deeply that MINTs are having impact in the communities that intend to serve. Beyond affordable rents, we see a MINT having other short-term outcomes and additional long-term impact.
To measure and evaluate, we have taken a three-prong approach to our pilots:
Conducted a resident survey, in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, aimed to evaluate resident experiences in the neighborhood. The survey was administered by paid residents of the community. The baseline survey yielded around 200 surveys per neighborhood
Collected third-party data from local and publicly available sources, to track items like neighborhood demographics, vacancy, and crime
Tracked MINT operations data, such as dollars going into renovations
As we start moving into new neighborhoods nationally, we are revisiting our approach to-date and thinking through a number of questions related to how we staff this work (in-house? third-party?) and how we iterate on this approach (in-depth interviews with our MINT renters?). If you have ideas around how to further build out this work, or want to learn more about our approach to date, reach out!
Cleveland Capital Raise
A strong set of local and national partners have demonstrated interest in the capital for the Metro West Neighborhood Trust on the westside of Cleveland. We’ll likely be back in Cleveland early next year for an in person diligence trip with some national funders. If you have additional suggestions of potential funders, please reach out or suggest away. We appreciate your previous newsletter forwards to new capital partners.
Metro West CDO ED Ricardo Leon taking the TN team for a spin across the Westside in Cleveland
Hiring
Beyond the Data Scientist role, we’ll be opening up additional new hiring in the new year. Please share what we’re doing when you hear of talented people who want to be part of a new social venture working hard to fight displacement, change power structures, and ensure safe, accessible affordable housing.
Appreciation
We have a lot of things to be thankful for in this work, but here are three we’re thinking about a lot this quarter:
MINT Boards & Trustees
The Kendall-Whittier Neighborhood Trust and Lykins Neighborhood Trust have boards and trust stewardship committees of residents, community development experts, and other stakeholders who have stewarded these new institutions into promising positions of strength and accountability in their communities. We set up this governance out of a belief that this mix of expertise, those closest to the problems, those with long track records and lived experience, can together take on the complex problem that is real anti-displacement in the face of gentrification, and yet the TN team is always impressed after each board and TSC meeting. Thank you.
Franchell
Franchell, the founding director of the Kendall-Whittier Neighborhood Trust, took a new role with the Tulsa Economic Development Corporation. We loved working with Franchell on the launch and early operations of the KWNT over nearly two years. We’re also excited by Gretchen Mudoga’s arrival at Growing Together and new role in leading the KWNT with Eva Peña.
Franchell came by KC this fall and we toured the work of the Lykins Neighborhood Trust
Funders
The fundraise to get Trust Neighborhoods a runway to get this work off the ground consumed more of our time than we anticipated, but we hit our goal for the 2021 portion of this runway a month early thanks to our generous supporters who have stepped in to enable this work early on: The Kresge Foundation, Wells Fargo’s Housing Affordability Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, Beth and Russ Siegelman, The Barry and Mimi Sternlicht Foundation, Jesse Pollak, The Housing Lab, Graciela Watrous, Julian Watrous, Bess Weatherman, and Jeannie and Jonathan Lavine. Thank you.
We have so much work ahead of us, but we feel so lucky to get to spend our days with such brilliant residents, national partners and others who care deeply about justice, housing, and creating real impact at scale. We’re thankful for what 2021 has begun. We’re excited for what we’ll create together in 2022.
Trust Neighborhoods in the media
Houston Chronicle // Nov 6, 2021 // Here’s how to stop displacement
Kansas City Beacon // June 28, 2021 // How a Kansas City neighborhood is transforming its dangerous and abandoned buildings
Purpose Foundation Case Study // April 13, 2021 // Building mixed-income neighborhoods: tightrope between investment and displacement
NPR // March 25, 2021 // Trust Neighborhoods has a blueprint for developing low-income communities minus gentrification and displacement
Kresge // February 28, 2021 // Neighborhood Investment Trusts are promising wealth-building models for residents in revitalizing communities
Impact Alpha // February 23, 2021 // Neighborhood trusts are taking on speculators and building community wealth
Brookings // February 2, 2021 // How a Kansas City Neighborhood is protecting renters while investing in itself