Stewardship and Growth

Stewardship

Permanent affordability is more than building affordable spaces. At CCCLT, we feel that stewardship is a critical component for ensuring that historically marginalized communities such as those families in Black and low income neighborhoods have the information, awareness and accessibility--those avenues that have been blocked because of multiple generations of systemic racism-- to increase intergenerational wealth, earn higher incomes and accumulate wealth. 

What does that look like? 

It starts with communication and getting responses from the people we are serving, and finding out what tools they require to improve their quality of life. Our stewardship manager holds meaningful conversations through regular community-building social events with those families who occupy and live around CCCLT’s affordable real estate. With this ongoing feedback, the stewardship manager is able to produce regularly-scheduled financial wellness programming and related educational programming. In tandem with this, the manager can assist individual residents in accessing community assets - such as area schools and retail services - and through referrals and assistance, engaging with the larger community and citywide opportunities (such as navigating local government, voting access, job training, small business incubation or health services).

This kind of stewardship takes time and engagement, but it is this kind of commitment that will improve the present and future for many families and begin to reverse the effects of sustained racism.

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    •  Policy Work

    Policy Goal and Recommendations

    New Orleans has made some strides in recent years to combat the city’s affordable housing crisis, but we feel that little attention has been paid and opportunities offered to permanently affordable solutions such as the community land trust model. Payment assistance such as soft second mortgage programs and other subsidies are useful, but they ultimately only benefit one family (the initial buyer) while community land trust single family homes allow for affordability to be passed on from family to family with subsequent home sales. 

    CCCLT’s 2021-22 policy goal is to make ​​all City of New Orleans related single family home subsidies accessible to community land trust home buyers including:
    • City of New Orleans down payment assistance (i.e. soft second mortgages)
    • NORA Orleans Housing Investment Program (O-HIP)
    • HANO Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Homeownership Program

    Recommendations 

    Reconsider How We Tax Affordable Single-Family Homes:The City of New Orleans, other public agencies and various non-profits subsidize affordable single-family housing annually through a number of initiatives, including down payment assistance (i.e. soft second mortgages) and Finance New Orleans’s Green Mortgage program. And unfortunately every year affordable buyers, households whose maximum annual earnings capacity typically plateaus relatively early in life (in their 30s or 40s), sell or lose their subsidized homes because they cannot afford rising property taxes. 


    City government and Council should consider initiatives – in concert with the state officials - to cap taxes on affordable single-family homes. 

    Update the City of New Orleans’s inclusionary zone ordinance to include Single Family Homes: The current inclusionary zoning ordinance and the associated density bonus require both legislative changes to be viable for affordable single-family home development and the creation of density bonus rules to be applicable to single-family homes. .

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