Dany Ricci moved to Pittsburgh from San Francisco a little over two years ago. Ricci was paying for a relatively expensive room in Bloomfield last year when a roommate stopped contributing to the bills and rent. Ricci, who uses they/them pronouns, wanted to be done with renting.
“I just didn't want my living situation to be at the mercy of landlords or property management companies or roommates or anything like that,” they said.
Ricci was working a temp job and had little savings, but they took a home-ownership class and learned about the City of Bridges Community Land Trust. The nonprofit organization was founded five years ago to help create permanently affordable homes in the city, and people like Ricci are its bread-and-butter: those with reliable if modest income, a decent credit score and enough savings to pay some closing costs.
The land trust had a row house for sale in East Liberty, a neighborhood that has become unaffordable for many low-income residents. The land trust would sell Ricci the building but maintain ownership of the land underneath it. Ricci would be able to build up capital in the house — but if they ever decided to move, they’d have to sell to someone else of modest means.
Ricci said they were happy to accept that price cap: “Coming from California, home ownership just really seemed like a pipe dream. I've spent many years just living paycheck-to-paycheck. That's what my mom is doing. That's what a lot of my friends are doing.”
This summer, Ricci planted a tree in the yard and plans to start a garden: “I felt like I could actually put down roots, and everything will still be there.”
Success stories like Ricci are why the land trust model has become increasingly popular across the country, and why City of Bridges has established itself as the premier land trust in Pittsburgh. But it faces challenges trying to keep up with an affordability crisis that seems to be growing faster than the trust can.
A pathway to stability and intergenerational wealth
Community land trusts make affordable housing permanent, which differentiates them from typical subsidized affordable housing approaches. Jason Webb, who works to create land trusts through Grounded Solutions, said that affordable housing subsidies typically allow a property to be sold at market rates after 30 years.
Land trusts have been growing increasingly popular: A 2022 survey by Grounded, the country’s leading proponent of land trusts, showed the number of land trusts had increased 30% during the previous decade. It found more than 43,000 total land trust homes built or in the pipeline.
Community nonprofits began looking into bringing land trusts to Pittsburgh a little over a decade ago. At the time, only a handful of neighborhood housing markets were booming in places like Lawrenceville. Land trusts were seen as an opportunity, not just to help individual low-income residents find housing, but to save the character of these neighborhoods before they became overwhelmed.
“We were starting to see the anecdotes of, ‘Hey, you know, my brother can't move back, my kid can't move back, my nephew can't move back anymore,’” said Ed Nusser, who at the time was the housing director for the Lawrenceville Corporation.
About a decade ago, Nusser said, the average cost of a home in Lawrenceville had risen above $200,000. Residents worried about the impact.
Now, the average home price across the entire city is $235,000, according to Zillow, and Nusser said housing-affordability challenges have become ubiquitous.
“The data shows you that it's across the city, it's across the county,” he said. “Home prices, rents are all accelerating faster than incomes are.”
Musser founded the City of Bridges Community Land Trust to meet that challenge. In the five years since, the nonprofit has become the Pittsburgh area’s premier land trust, fostering affordable housing for 39 residents. It has another 35 homes in construction or about to start construction.
“That sort of plucky-startup phase is over,” Nusser said. “And now the organization is entering a sort of stable growth phase.”
Earlier this year, Nusser left City of Bridges to become director of housing strategy for Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato — a change that reflects how the land trust’s work has been viewed by local progressive leaders.
During a speech at City of Bridges’ five-year anniversary event in July, Innamorato said housing is the county’s biggest challenge. It’s the third-most important issue for residents who responded to county surveys, Innamorato said, and the top issue for the Black respondents. One of the main reasons there aren’t enough affordable places to rent, she added, is because there are not enough affordable places to buy.
Many residents “want to invest in their neighborhood and grow their community. They want access to stability and intergenerational wealth that comes with home ownership,” Innamorato said. “But for too many, that pathway is blocked. It's blocked because of high prices, limited supply, aggressive out-of-town investors or homes that are just uninhabitable.”
The question the land trust is trying to answer — how many residents like Ricci can they help find affordable housing for?
Every project is a snowflake
Julie Nigro, the land trust’s director of real estate, recently gave a tour of four new homes in Hazelwood that were nearly finished after nearly five years of planning and preparation.
Nigro walked across a wooden board through the front door to show off the homes’ triple-pane windows, extra insulation and solar panels. These additions raised the cost of projects for the land trust but should make them more economical for future owners.
“We are about not only building affordable housing but making sure it's affordable to live in as well,” Nigro said.
In the previous couple of years, the land trust had five or 10 homes under construction during their peak season. This year, Nigro says they have 25, five of which have already sold.
“Managing all of that is … lots of spreadsheets,” she said.
Nigro made another stop in Garfield, where the land trust gutted a duplex in one part of the neighborhood and is selling the renovated units for $150,000 each. It demolished another home nearby and will replace it with three new modular homes that will sell for about $200,000 each.
City of Bridges works in communities where the neighborhood invites them. The Garfield parcels were sold to the trust by the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, which wanted to preserve low-income housing rather than see another home sold at market rate.
Garfield has a land trust of its own, but Gary Cirrincione, a member of that organization, said it lacks the capacity to develop multimillion-dollar housing projects.
“We don't feel confident to compete in that area. Resources are starting to dry up all over the city,” Cirrincione said."So the City of Bridges has been securing those resources and investing in that direction.”
But it isn’t easy. Nigro said the cost of building or renovating the homes in Garfield is about twice as much as the trust will get from selling them. She said fundraising is the part of the process that slows down land trust’s work the most as it cobbles together funds from federal, state, county and city programs.
“Every project is a kind of snowflake,” Nigro said.
The land trust will soon begin work on another Hazelwood project that could bring down its costs: a four-unit building that will include two family-style dwellings and two smaller homes. The total will be almost $100,000 less per unit — enough to provide a home to one more family than the project could have offered if it had been building single-family homes.
“It helps the economies of scale when you build one roof versus four,” Nigro said.
Nigro used to work on bigger low-income rental development for Allegheny County Economic Development. She said there is more government funding available to build large rental projects.
While the land trust’s focus has been taking single lots, she said, “In places where it makes sense, I think trying to do some more multi-unit buildings could be helpful in helping us save some costs and still create a really nice product.”
And in fact, Pittsburgh’s second-biggest land trust is ready to scrap its focus on single-family homes entirely and give more attention to larger developments.
Subtraction by addition
The most concentrated grouping of land-trust homes in the city was not built by City of Bridges but by the Oakland Trust. The organization, which is sponsored by the Oakland Planning and Development Corporation, has created 17 permanently affordable homes in the neighborhood since 2018 and has another nine for sale now.
But because of Oakland’s housing market, the land trust is likely to move away from single-family homes and into multifamily dwellings, according to Andrea Boykowycz, the executive director of the Oakland Planning and Development Corporation.
When a home in Oakland goes up for sale, it’s almost always a company or a landlord that buys it, Boykowycz said. And the new owners often split the homes into small rentals that exceed their occupancy permits. But enforcing housing codes would put roughly 8,000 students out on the street, she said.
Landlords buy homes at a markup of $100,000. Boykowycz knows this amount because the land trust has sold some market-rate homes that require the buyer to live in the home — and they fetch a lot less than the ones being purchased by landlords. That’s made Oakland unaffordable for many — especially Black residents, Boykowycz said.
That would seem to be the kind of neighborhood where a land trust would thrive. But the Oakland Land Trust has had trouble finding buyers: Of the nine homes it has put on the market this year, so far only two are under contract.
“Most people probably don't assume that it is possible to own a home affordably in Oakland,” Boykowycz said. “And then Oakland has the reputation as being so heavily dominated by student rental that there's a lot of people who don't necessarily think of it as being a place where anybody lives who owns a home.”
Boykowycz said her group is rethinking its approach to housing to align with the community’s 2022 neighborhood master plan. The plan emphasizes increasing density with multifamily units rather than single-family homes.
Boykowycz said that, if anything, focusing on single-family homes would make affordability issues worse.
“Each project that we undertake, each house that we renovate and take off the market for multifamily rental or just plain rental — that sort of diminishes the supply further,” she said.
A grand vision for affordable housing
Most land trust proponents say it is just one part of an “all-of-the-above” strategy for providing affordable housing. There isn’t a big-picture plan for how large that part should be, said Brian Stromberg, the national policy director for Grounded Solutions.
“I don't know if we really have a 50-year goal, necessarily,” for the role trusts should play, said Stromberg. He estimates that currently, land trusts are responsible for only 0.001% of homes on the market. "It's really, really small.”
And there are obstacles to clear if the movement hopes to become any larger.
Several recent land trust projects and programs were funded with federal COVID aid — a funding source that will soon dry up.
Meanwhile, Nigro said, high interest rates and recent spikes in construction costs have made it more expensive to build homes, and for residents to buy them.
Advocacy group Pro-Housing Pittsburgh, which promotes housing of all types, believes that changes to zoning codes would make it cheaper and easier to do business for land trusts and private developers alike.
“It's really, really expensive to build it,” said Dave Vatz, a member of Pro-Housing Pittsburgh. “And that's why the vast majority of Pittsburghers and people in Allegheny County in the Pittsburgh area have market-rate housing.”
City of Bridges was instrumental in pushing for one of the biggest changes to the housing code in recent years. One of its developments was held up in the Fineview neighborhood because new row houses were not allowed there. Pittsburgh City Councilor Bobby Wilson helped pass a law that made row houses legal across the city.
More changes could be coming soon, Wilson predicted at the City of Bridges’ five-year anniversary event: “We want to make a lot of zoning changes. And so that's the goal here.”
Dave Breingan, the executive director of Lawrenceville United, said he’s been working with City of Bridges for a few years to create a program that would allow neighborhoods to maintain more of their housing stock as affordable — without the expensive work of building housing from scratch.
For example, Breingan said, one Lawrenceville resident recently had a stroke and lost her job during the COVID pandemic. Faced with foreclosure, she ended up selling her land to the land trust for the balance of her mortgage. She kept ownership over the building and a roof over her head, while adding a property that will be kept affordable in perpetuity.
“She has no kids, so she wasn't concerned about leaving maximum equity for her heirs,” Breingan said. “She was really excited to see that this home was going to be preserved to always go for households like hers.”
