BNCLT Board and Staff Dig in on Ground Leases
On Sunday, May 5th, the BNCLT board and staff gathered in person at the beautiful First Church in Roxbury to dig into several important policies we are currently developing — including our ground lease. Days like this are so valuable to BNCLT: days when we can come together, be in community, and really spend some time learning and thinking about how we translate our values of permanent affordability and community control into our organizational structures. As one of our board members said,
“The way we were able to generate good thinking, and struggle with some ideas — that’s what makes it work.”
At the retreat, we had a deep conversation about the relationship between ground leases and wealth-building. BNCLT’s ground lease is the document that the organization and individual homeowners will agree to, and which will ensure that CLT properties are affordable in perpetuity. One way the ground lease does this is by capping the amount that a homeowner can resell their home for when they are ready to leave. Rather than selling their homes at market rate, CLT homeowners sell their homes according to a resale formula, guaranteeing that these properties are affordable for the next buyers. A ground lease requires a thoughtful balancing act — ensuring that homeowners are able to accrue some equity, while committing to keep the home affordable for the generations to come.
Before talking about the ground lease itself, it was important for the board to root itself in the organization’s mission to balance individual and community wealth. One of our board members reflected:
“I think [there is] commonality in where our hearts are for the community — for our neighbors, for our family, and for our human family. And I guess for me the hope is to be in a place to develop that true community. It’s been this thing for too long — ‘what about me, and what I gotta do’ type of thinking. And getting back to ‘us.’ How do we make that real again and get back to that?”
That values-focused conversation then led us into a more concrete conversation about different ground lease resale formulas. The Board learned about the various options, and thought about which one(s) would best align with BNCLT’s mission. To help compare the different options, the Board broke into small groups and graphed the amount of equity a CLT homeowner might be able to accrue over time, according to different resale formulas. Our staff member Markeisha said it best, when she explained her commitment to making sure we all understand the different options, which will have a strong impact on the organization and surrounding communities moving forward:
“I wanted to learn [about ground lease resale formulas] so I can be real intentional, so I can clearly express it to you guys and you understand it, and so we can be real intentional of how we move ahead. Because these are our communities. And we want to make sure that we are the ones who have the community control. And that we’re doing it in a way that is beneficial to us.”
We will continue to discuss these values and options with our members in upcoming months.
We also had a robust conversation about our Property Transfer Acceptance Policy, as we work with homeowners who are interested in transferring their properties to BNCLT through donations, sales, bequests, land transfers, or life estates. Louisa Winchell has been hard at work this year with the Greater Boston CLT Network, and with our Acquisition and Real Estate Committee, to develop broadly applicable and BNCLT-specific policies for these CLT property transfers.