Swag, TAB, momentum, and a deep dive on MINTs & climate goals
We’re just back from a team retreat together in Boston, where we spent time with existing partners like East Boston CDC and City Life Vida Urbana, and appreciated some quality team sessions reflecting, learning, and strategizing. We’ll share more on the retreat, our first new swag in years, and new and existing MINT updates. We also have a deeper dive into a topic we’ve spent less time on in our newsletter: how MINTs have been advancing climate goals. More on all of that below!
New MINTs underway
Our partners in Denver and Detroit have been especially busy as we’ve worked together on forming MINTs there.
In Denver, the East Colfax Neighborhood Trust team has its first property under contract, accelerating the MINT formation there. It’s a particularly meaningful apartment building with residents East Colfax Community Collaborative has worked closely with on housing organizing. It’s also a meaningful area, right in a neighborhood of naturally occurring affordable apartments that needs more accountable ownership adjoining new high-end developments. This is happening alongside the MINT formation process, and as the Denver team puts together the capital for the overall MINT the East Colfax Community Collaborative wants to create.
In Detroit, the team has been out negotiating on some promising early acquisitions alongside raising capital and starting the resident workshops, with the third workshop just happening this week. From these resident engagement sessions, we’ve heard that long-time residents, some of whom have lived in the neighborhood all their lives, are excited to have a voice in the future development of their community. The taskforce is especially focused on the MINT's potential to reinforce community ties and provide an opportunity for small dollar investors to participate.
Hello, TAB! Both Denver and Detroit may use our new acquisition & bridge lending program. We’ll likely dive deeper into this in a future newsletter, but the short is that TN has received early commitments and is raising a small financing facility to support quick acquisitions and bridge the time gap between some of these acquisitions and the MINT’s full long-term capital needs. This is particularly important given our mandate of supporting neighborhoods with creating MINTs in these windows of opportunity. Public and philanthropic investors often operate on relatively extended timelines (relative to private, profit-oriented actors), which can lead to missed opportunities for MINTs. We’re thrilled we may soon have the ability to help bridge that gap, and this may even be used as soon as this fall for Detroit or Denver.
Planning new infill in Detroit: the Central Detroit Neighborhood Trust team is looking at new infill options alongside acquisition and renovation work, and has put out an expression of interest for new construction builders, modular and traditional, around some of the priorities residents and partners there have for helping rebuild the neighborhood fabric.
Completing new homes in Tulsa: the Kendall-Whittier Neighborhood Trust in Tulsa has finished one of its two newly built homes. This has allowed it both to fill in a vacant lot and add to the quality of the street as well as tailor its housing to the families it seeks to serve in furthering Growing Together’s education priorities in the neighborhood.
The Trust Neighborhoods board came together for an in-person board meeting in Kansas City in May. This gave our board the ability to walk the city’s Northeast’s neighborhoods, take in some of the work of the Northeast Neighborhood Trust, and meet Terrell Jolly and Jesse Hawks on the NENT team. We were also grateful that the Northeast Neighborhood Trust let us hold the Trust Neighborhoods board meeting in one of their newly acquired and under renovation apartments.
Hello, Miranda O’Connell: We’re also fortunate to have just added a strong new member of the Trust Neighborhoods board, Miranda Lindl O’Connell. Miranda worked closely with Trust Neighborhoods in her prior role at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius where she specialized in innovative investment vehicles and structures to achieve impact-oriented goals. She was Office Managing Partner for their San Francisco office, and is now Senior Counsel for Impact Investments at Builders Vision. We’re thrilled to have Miranda join our board.
Together in Boston: Trust Neighborhoods also came together in Boston this past week, and alongside team workshops we were lucky to spend time with many partners who have been such good parts of this work, including City Life Vida Urbana and the East Boston CDC.
The team retreat also featured… new swag! For the first time in a few years, we have new sweatshirts and got extras following the interest last time. If you would like to order some new Trust Neighborhoods apparel for yourself or a friend, please fill out the order form here!
The full TN team together in East Boston this month
Finally, on new neighborhood partners, we’re happy to say that we are also opening back up pipeline later this year to work with new neighborhoods. While our capacity will still be limited, please reach out if you want to work with us on setting up a MINT in your neighborhood or know a neighborhood and partner who could benefit from a MINT.
In the media
The National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders (NALCAB) // April 9th, 2024 // (Growing Together | Tulsa, OK) Cambios en el Barrio: Strategies for Equitable Development
Accelerator for America // April 17, 2024 // Webinar on Options for Long-Term Housing Affordability
Propmodo // April 28, 2024 // Communities Work to Create Lasting Affordability Through Local Development
And, while not on TN, it’s always great to see our peers featured: New York Times // May 13, 2024 // Priced Out of Housing, Communities Take Development Into Their Own Hands
Diving deep into how MINTs advance climate goals
While we at Trust Neighborhoods often focus on our core three missions – preventing displacement, making neighborhoods even better places to live, and building community power – there is behind this effort a drive to create sustainable, greener, and healthier housing. For our deep dive this quarter, we wanted to give you all a look at how MINTs are also a key driver when it comes to decarbonizing low-income housing nationwide and driving an effort to cut costs and ensure low-income communities aren’t left behind in the transition to cleaner energy.
This is also a key moment to make sure partners, funders, and public officials understand how MINTs drive sustainability. Philanthropy and public funds are rightly focusing on driving sustainability. We want to ensure they understand how MINTs are competitive as effective vehicles to achieve these goals. Congress and the Biden Administration are rolling out massive green energy programs. A primary focus for us is supporting MINTs with matching with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
To get a sense of scale, this could be more than $11 billion of relevant funding (based on this Accelerator for America summary) available for these efforts.
Climate United Fund, $6.97 Billion
Power Forward Communities, $2 Billion
OFN’s Clean Energy Community Investments, $2.29 Billion
We are interested in better defining TN’s sustainability framework and helping MINTs further support climate resilient and sustainable mixed-income housing.
MINTS Driving Sustainability
From the beginning, MINTs have advanced sustainability. We see two main buckets of sustainable impact, each with immediate and long-term benefits for residents and the neighborhood:
Energy-Efficient Renovations: While talks about green building often focus on flashy projects with LEED certifications and green roofs, housing preservation is more energy efficient than new construction and benefits existing renters in their communities. Housing preservation has lower embedded carbon, the greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing, transportation, installation, ect. of building materials, with 50-75% lower emissions than new construction (Carbon Leadership Forum).
MINTs have done significant renovations of previously vacant or poorly maintained rental housing, reducing their carbon footprint. Depending on the building, these renovations have included new roofs, better installation, energy efficient appliances, electrification, and, in one instance in East Boston, adding solar panels. At the start of 2024, our Kansas City MINT had 70% of its capital investments spent on renovations, much of which went to greening units!Immediate Impacts: these renovations create energy savings for the resident and, ultimately, for the planet. Upgrading appliances both reduces a unit’s carbon footprint and its utility bills, giving renters more monthly spending power. In addition, these upgrades create a healthier living environment for residents, reducing mold, asbestos, leaks, and unclean air. EBNT has removed lead from dozens of units, deeply meaningful for the families and children of Eastie.
Long-term Benefits: Over time, these MINTs are also revitalizing the block and making the neighborhood-at-large a safer and healthier place to live. This can result in better community health, increasing quality and length of life while decreasing unnecessary healthcare spending.
Before and after KWNT’s renovation of a vacant home on East Admiral Court
Neighborhood and Community Cohesion: MINTs focus on preserving affordability in urban, walkable neighborhoods with high access to transit, reducing car dependency and emissions (the average walk score across MINTs is 80!). MINTs also prevent displacement to enable households to remain in their communities, reducing the need for moving, new commutes, and trips back and forth between neighborhoods.
Immediate Impacts: MINTs support communities to stay together, individuals to stay in their jobs, children to stay in their schools, and church and other religious communities to stay together. Avoiding displacement reduces emissions from time spent in cars and other environmental impacts of a decentralized community.
Long-term Benefits: a better connected community has a myriad of positive effects, including better public health. In addition, as MINTs target neighborhoods at risk of gentrification, often the neighborhoods they are in are poised to see new investments that families can take advantage of such as new parks, better schools, and more services.
Investment Awareness
While we’re looking forward to positioning MINTs to take advantage of this new wave of funding, we remain aware of pressures that large government investment can put on gentrification. The goal of many of these new programs is focused on environmental benefits, which can be disconnected from the people it directly impacts. For example, East Boston shows this in two ways. Residents won investment in environmental remediation in Eastie, most famously by blocking trucks with baby carriages. While successful, this contributed to the development of new waterfront luxury properties that had ripple effects throughout the neighborhood, quickly escalating rents above what longterm neighborhood residents could afford. Compounding this, organizer, and now EBNT Trust Stewardship Committee member Andres Del Castillo, spoke at the EBNT celebration of how residents organized to win greater mass transit access with the Blue Line only to see their very own homes re-branded as “the Blue Line portfolio.” THe portfolio was sold as higher-income housing, marketed in videos showing an Eastie with no latino residents. Years later, EBNT now owns this portfolio and has put it back into the hands of the community with the added layer of community control.
We would be naive to think that the incoming investments in green infrastructure and sustainability improvements don’t risk these same unintended consequences. Catalyst events like in East Boston, new green jobs, and new parks can all lead to inflated land values. As we’ve spoken of before around fixing the neighborhood-level social contract, residents get this. We often rightly fear that these well-intended investments may actually not benefit current residents and, further, will cause displacement. That is why it is more important than ever that these new green investments are complemented with rigorous anti-displacement tools. Our hope is to pair MINTs with neighborhoods benefiting from large new investments, so that the investment can also serve residents who currently live there, through both preserved affordability and building community power.
Looking Forward
We’re excited about what these major new investments in climate goals can mean for these MINTs that can be so meaningful in helping achieve them, but we’re also worried. We fear that, with our limited team capacity, the newness of MINTs, and the entrenched interests neighborhoods are so often up against, we may lose this historic chance to help make these neighborhoods more sustainable while protecting current residents and building community power. So we want to ask for your help, and we have a few starting ideas:
If you are also looking to prepare and understand this new funding or are an allocator of it, we’d love to connect! There are many ways that we see MINTs taking advantage of green funding. For example, a dream would be setting up a national renovation fund that MINTs can use right after acquisition to streamline building renovations.
We are also working to better understand how to measure and quantitatively track MINTs’ environmental impact. We’d love to connect more with organizations who have a framework for how to do this, both building-by-building and neighborhood-wide impact. This year we’re completing our every 3 year neighborhood surveys with our Kansas City and Tulsa MINTs to better understand neighborhood level impact in our first two MINTs.
We’re curious what unintended consequences people are tracking in their communities and if there are ways MINTs can help protect against them.
We would love to chat about the topics above or other items you think we’re missing in how we’re preparing for IRA and GGRF funding. Reach out to us!