Trust Neighborhoods

Community-rooted ownership for inclusive neighborhood growth

In a nutshell

Sometimes revisiting an old conversation reminds us just how early some organizations were in pointing toward what’s needed next. When we first spoke with Kavya Shankar in 2021, Trust Neighborhoods was already emerging as one of the early partners of the Purpose US Team – and among the first in the real estate space to put steward-ownership into practice through a purpose trust structure. Through Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trusts (MINTs), the team is building community-rooted ownership models designed to grow with neighborhoods while keeping long-term residents at the center.

We’re grateful to Kavya for helping us refresh this interview and are very much looking forward to meeting her in person soon. If you find yourself equally hooked, let’s carry this conversation forward.

Photo: Trust Neighborhoods

Lilly Pokraka: What challenges are you trying to solve with Trust Neighborhoods?

Kavya Shankar: There are neighborhoods across the country that have been historically disinvested from and discriminated against. Those neighborhoods have had individuals or neighborhood groups who have long fought to bring more resources into those communities. More recently, we're starting to see a growing demand for urban, walkable neighborhoods. And so those same neighborhoods are now starting to get the investment that they long sought after. On one hand, the investment can do a lot of good: it can heal vacancy, fix lower-quality property, and reduce crime. Overall, it can make the neighborhood richer in opportunity. But on the flip side, typically that investment is coupled with rising rents. Rents will often rise so fast that long-term residents can no longer afford to remain in the neighborhood. And so you end up in a situation where a neighborhood is transitioned to being higher in opportunity, but the long-term residents have been displaced from the neighborhood and cannot benefit from that opportunity. So we are trying to say: As a neighborhood ‒ with these investments ‒ continues to grow, how do we make sure that this growth is in service of long-term residents, not just future residents and investors?

Lilly: How are you approaching this challenge?

Kavya: We realized that neighborhoods needed a tool to both attract investment and protect long-term residents. That led us to create the Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust (MINT). We partner with existing neighborhood groups and help them set up a MINT, which practically functions as a neighborhood’s own ownership entity. The MINT takes vacant and/or poorly maintained properties and converts them into quality mixed-income rental housing and retail. Single-family homes and apartments are all kept in the same portfolio, and a small portion of those are floated at market-rate. As the neighborhood appreciates in value, the rents for the market-rate properties go up, and the additional money helps cross-subsidise the other units to keep them affordable for the long run and preempt gentrification-driven displacement while also offering a return to investors.

Lilly: How do you make sure that control remains with and within the community?

Kavya: The community component is key to the MINT model. Its inclusive governance structure ensures community control. This is manifested in the authorship of the Purpose Trust Agreement that is written in collaboration with a neighborhood task force, but also in the control over the Perpetual Purpose Trust, which holds 100% of the voting shares of the MINT’s rental portfolio. Beyond community control, there is an economic and wealth-building component to the MINT. Economic upside is split between the neighborhood and investors, as a form of long-term community wealth. Another thing to note in terms of who is involved is the neighborhood task force that is specifically helping to support this project. Neighborhood groups usually have a lot of projects going on ‒ setting up the MINT is only one of them. So we work with the neighborhood groups on setting up this task force, which is really specifically focused on the MINT. We try to make sure that the task force is representative of the racial and cultural identity of the neighborhood, and that it includes renters, who are sometimes less engaged in existing neighborhood-level governance. We want a variety of tenures of people who have been in the neighborhood. And that group, their primary focus, is offering feedback that will inform the trust agreement ‒ the document that governs the Perpetual Purpose Trust.

Lilly: Could you tell me a little bit about the projects you are currently working on?

Kavya: We’ve launched 5 MINTs to date, which together own over 250 units of housing in their neighborhoods – Northeast Kansas City, Kendall-Whittier, Tulsa, East Colfax Denver / Aurora, Central Fresno, and East Boston. What is nice about our projects is that there is an opportunity to build on and expand the capacity and range of the neighborhood organizations we steward-ownership.com partner with. So, for example, in Tulsa, the neighborhood group was originally more education-focused. They realized though, that if they improve the quality of the local bilingual schools, it will put pressure on rents in the neighborhood. The MINT was a natural extension of their work and helped them build out their housing strategy.

Photo: Trust Neighborhoods

Lilly: Imagine the neighborhoods you are working with at the moment in 10 years’ time ‒ what will have changed?

Kavya: I think a lot will have changed. One is that they will be neighborhoods that people will feel a lot of pride in living in, ones where there is a strong sense of belonging and where the neighborhoods deliver high opportunities, such as good economic, social, and health outcomes. I imagine the neighborhoods to have residents who have lived there for a really long time and can continue to afford living there. That renters can live alongside homeowners. And that this will form a cohesion to the community and a sense of ownership over being able to make the neighborhood what people want and need. Key to this vision is trustworthiness. Even before these changes, we want to create a feeling of trust that a renter will be a part of whatever the future of their neighborhood is if they want to be. Today, that trust often, and rightly, isn’t there. Knowing you can be part of a neighborhood means not only taking part in governance, but also just literally being able to afford to live in a place that is meaningful for them. That seems like such a simple thing, but it hasn’t been true for too many people in too many neighborhoods.

Lilly: What role do you think the ownership and governance structure of the MINT model will have played for this future scenario?

Kavya: I am sure that some of it will be through the ownership entity of the MINT. But hopefully, the MINT is just step one of the ability for the neighborhood to take on other tools and entities that really give people ownership over being able to shape their own neighborhoods for the better. I hope that those who are in the driver’s seat of the neighborhood are really representative of the demographics and background of the community. I would love to see the Operating Board of the MINT to be fully, one hundred per cent, representative of the neighborhood. And that's all because this tool has given people who might not normally have a seat at the table or an ability to engage in real estate and neighborhood development, a real opportunity to shape what their community looks like for the long-term.

Thank you for the interview!

Photo: Trust Neighborhoods

Why a Purpose Trust?

The MINT’s Purpose Trust holds 100% of the voting shares of the neighborhood’s real estate, keeping control with the community while removing it from speculative markets. Non-voting economic rights are held by investors, and any surplus benefits long-term residents.

How a MINT works: