Project Summary:
Structural racism in housing takes many forms, including historical redlining, racially restrictive covenants, housing voucher discrimination, mortgage lending bias, racial segregation, eviction, gentrification and displacement, access to home ownership and home equity, poor housing quality, housing cost burden, discrimination in appraisals, and poor neighborhood quality. Although it is clear that structural racism in housing causes and perpetuates health inequity, overcoming it—or divorcing it from negative health outcomes—has proven to be a daunting challenge. The long history of structural racism in housing has deeply embedded inequity into the country’s social fabric and the structure of cities. Key hallmarks of this structure include stark patterns of racial segregation and wide gaps in home ownership rates by race that have persisted over decades, despite fair housing laws and other attempts to redress these inequities.
To break the cycle, it is imperative to invest in disinvested people and places. One promising approach to achieving this goal, which has received little attention from health researchers, is the Community Land Trust (CLT).
A Land Trust (LT) is an organization that obtains and holds land for a specific purpose (e.g., environmental conservation, housing), providing use of the land through agreements. In a Community Land Trust, this organization represents the community and is often a nonprofit organization governed by a board that includes community representatives. CLTs are leveraged to improve low-income home ownership and stabilize neighborhoods at risk of gentrification by acquiring land and regulating the purchase and sale of housing on the land. A CLT sells a property to a low-income buyer at an affordable price, below market value, leveraging subsidies. The buyer leases the land from the CLT and agrees to restrictions on resale of the home. The homeowner then pays the mortgage and owns the home, building home equity over time. If the homeowner chooses to sell the property, it must be below market value to ensure that another low-income buyer can purchase it, limiting the amount of money the buyer is able to make from the sale and keeping the property in low-income hands. By keeping costs low and controlling resale, the CLT can also guard against displacement of residents and gentrification, even as neighborhood improvements are made and, presumably, health benefits are realized.
The CLT model directly targets structural racism and seeks to impact social, structural, and environmental determinants of health, including home ownership, wealth, segregation, housing stability, and neighborhood and housing quality. However, few have examined links between CLTs and human health. The goal of this project is to catalyze research on the health impacts of CLTs in Wisconsin.
The vision for this project is to impact health and health equity by studying and leveraging CLTs as an innovative community generated solution with potential to reduce racial health inequities. We envision this pilot project as the catalyst for a new research program to study the health equity impacts of CLTs and leverage this knowledge to develop interventions, policies, practices, or implementation science approaches to bolster the positive health impacts of CLTs.
Collaborators: Milwaukee Community Land Trust. Milwaukee Community Land Trust, Medical College of Wisconsin, Madison Area Community Land Trust, Redress Movement, Envision Growth, Associated Bank