By Carolina Fernandez, Community Ownership Learning & Action Lab
This story is part of a spotlight series on the Community-Owned Futures Cohort, an initiative of the Community Ownership Learning & Action Lab (COLA Lab) at the University of Miami. Through the cohort, we support emerging leaders who are testing new ideas and expanding what’s possible in community ownership. These stories are examples of real people building power, stability, and shared prosperity through collective stewardship of the places they call home.
Learn more about LA Más — and don’t miss the organization’s new white paper and investment prospectus!
For years, residents across Northeast Los Angeles brought the same concern to LA Más. They were watching longtime neighbors disappear.
Apartment buildings were being sold. Corporate landlords and flippers were buying up properties. Rents were rising. And families who had spent decades in their neighborhoods were being pushed farther and farther away.
Residents weren’t asking for luxury housing or costly redevelopment. They were asking a simpler question: How do we stay?
That question led LA Más to step into a new role, not just as an organizer and community development nonprofit, but as a steward of local housing.
Today, LA Más is helping preserve affordable housing through a model that combines resident stewardship and mission-aligned capital. In Executive Director Helen Leung’s words:
“Our work has been intervening at a housing preservation level. We purchase, rehab, and keep NOAH — or naturally occurring affordable housing — for the benefit of the people.”
In under two years, the organization has acquired multiple apartment buildings in Northeast LA and protected housing for over 140 working-class residents. Helen sums up LA Más today:
“Over the past year and a half, we’ve raised five million dollars to take three properties off the market with our partners at Self-Help Ventures Fund. As co-owners, they can bring low-cost capital - really reasonable debt-like equity - while we do the work: resident engagement, asset management, property management. And our price is amazingly under $300,00 for acquisition rehab, whereas the cost of new LIHTC (low-income housing tax credit) properties are typically around $850,000 in Los Angeles.”
But LA Más’s story didn’t begin with a real estate strategy.
According to Helen, it began with a community demanding another option:
“Our community members were just like, ‘Can you try to just buy property so we have options to stay?’ And so we explored the ways to do that. We didn’t set out to be a developer. We asked lots of different other developers, ‘Can you partner with us? Will you come into Northeast LA?’ And basically the ecosystem said, ‘No, we don’t have enough money, time, resources. This is hard work. Good luck.’”
Instead, LA Más tapped into their decade of experience organizing alongside working-class residents across Northeast LA, and a growing conviction that preserving affordable housing means doing it directly themselves.
“Basically no one was going to do it. And if we were going to try it, we had to do it. We thought, ‘We think we can do it.’ So we entered escrow and we built our partnership with Self-Help Ventures Fund with our first property: let’s try, what do we have to lose?”
The opportunity arrived through a five-unit apartment building in Cypress Park. After the longtime owner passed away, her grandson wanted the property to remain a source of stability for the families she had intentionally kept housed for decades. As the building prepared to change hands, residents feared displacement. That building on Arvia Street became LA Más’s first acquisition.
“This was a big step for a community-based nonprofit. Rather than waiting until every dollar was committed — and risking the property being sold to another buyer — LA Más moved quickly and assembled the financing while the property was under contract.
This purchase became a proof of concept— and a bold one, at that. Helen herself admits it was risky. But it demonstrated that a community-rooted organization could compete in Los Angeles’ high-cost, highly competitive real estate market without sacrificing resident stability or long-term affordability.
Housing preservation is only part of the story. Democracy is a critical pillar in LA Más’s approach.
“Our programs have been shaped by community members. We’re held accountable by community members on multiple levels.”
Residents help shape the organization’s priorities through a community governance committee, and residents at individual properties can participate in decisions about stewardship, programming, and community use.
Before a property is purchased, residents help identify preservation opportunities, shape acquisition priorities, and define what successful stewardship should look like.
“We have resident meetings once a year and we actually keep them updated and get their feedback all the time… but our community governance committee meets every other month, and they hold us accountable even if they’re not residents on their property.”
That accountability extends beyond day-to-day operations.
“Our community members actually set the parameters for which properties we’re going to buy.”
In one of the country’s most expensive real estate markets, building community-owned housing doesn’t just require gumption and governance. It requires capital.
And that means making community-rooted projects legible to people who control capital.
Like many community ownership leaders the COLA Lab has encountered, Helen serves as a “translator” for whom the work is rooted in home. Having grown up in Northeast Los Angeles and built a career in housing policy and equitable development, she moves between worlds that often operate with very different priorities and languages, making shared ownership projects legible and investable to institutions that may not otherwise recognize their value. As Helen put it:
“When people are investing in an innovative new thing, they’re investing in the leader… I lean on my own expertise, the partnerships, the community rootedness.”
Translation work goes in both directions. One day, it may involve conversations with lenders, investors, or public agencies. The next day, it may involve helping residents understand financing decisions, tradeoffs, and long-term plans.
The translation work of LA Más’s leaders has become a critical part of the organization’s growth: To assemble financing, the organization has worked with mission-aligned partners, secured program-related investments, and built relationships that allow it to move quickly when preservation opportunities arise. At the same time, the organization has worked to make sure financial decisions remain accountable to community priorities rather than the other way around.
“We’re trying to commit to transparency, clarity on values, so it’s not just us making decisions — it’s everyone coming along for the ride of complicated and ongoing decisions.”
For LA Más, success is measured in stability.
At one property, four generations of the same family can now continue living in their building. At another property, residents helped shape decisions that allowed an elderly tenant to remain in the community as she entered retirement.
These outcomes rarely appear in traditional real estate metrics, but they sit at the center of LA Más’s philosophy: housing is part of the social infrastructure that allows families, relationships, culture, and community life to endure.
LA Más is currently working to expand its housing portfolio and continue refining a model that combines affordability and collective stewardship. The organization’s goal is to demonstrate that communities can play a meaningful role in shaping the future of housing in places experiencing intense market pressure and displacement.
For practitioners across the community ownership field, LA Más offers an example of what can happen when housing preservation is treated as a matter of shared opportunity and collective power.
The organization’s real estate strategy is still evolving. As Helen puts it:
“We were building the ship as we were sailing.”
That spirit of learning remains as LA Más has now moved beyond proof of concept. With multiple acquisitions completed and new mission-aligned capital fueling the work, the organization is demonstrating that community-rooted housing preservation can be both scalable and replicable.
Most importantly, the work is already helping create something many Northeast LA residents feared was disappearing: the ability to stay in the place they call home.
To learn more about LA Más and catch up on their latest work, or to get in touch with the COLA Lab, we’ve included some resources below.
Learn more about LA Más — and don’t miss the organization’s new white paper and investment prospectus!
Explore the Community Ownership Learning & Action Lab (COLA Lab)
Join the COLA Lab’s mailing list to receive more stories from the field and research-based resources
Contact the COLA Lab at communityownership@miami.edu