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.
In 2015, the most destabilizing effects of the real estate market became impossible to ignore in Denver’s Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea (GES) neighborhoods.
“2015, we really saw displacement start. It really felt like boom, all of a sudden rents doubled, all of a sudden people that had been in the community forever were being displaced and couldn’t find another place to live. And so, very quickly it became our number one organizing issue.”
That’s Nola Miguel, executive director of GES Coalition’s Tierra Colectiva Community Land Trust. At the time, the GES Coalition was focused on organizing around community health issues.
“A lot of people see organizing as activism… Community organizing is actually on-the-ground problem-solving.”
In response to the displacement crisis, residents didn’t just pursue the solution they thought was best; they started by listening. GES Coalition formed a housing organizing committee to study solutions and gather local data. Volunteers knocked on 1,500 doors and collected 500 surveys, all which informed the landmark GES People’s Survey of 2017.
The data from it helped catalyze community organizing power and led to the creation of local stewardship models, including one idea that kept rising to the top.
“That’s the survey — it’s on our website if you want to look at it — that showed us that 88% of our neighbors are at risk of displacement. That’s really what drove both the organizing work and our commitment to not just talk about solutions, but to actually implement the big solution, which ended up being the land trust.
The things that people really liked about it were the community control— I would say that was probably the number one reason. Sure we’re doing affordable housing and that’s great, but it was having control over development, because we were in the face of a huge $1.2 billion highway expansion project — the National Western, which is now over $1.6 billion. These huge public investment projects that were pressing. And it just felt like we need something that we can control and that has that collective ownership piece to it. The land trust just kept coming up as the best way to do that.”
So while major public investments and infrastructure projects charged ahead and reshaped neighborhoods, the GES Coalition made a collective decision.
“We have a picture of the moment that we decided, that we said, ‘Yes, we want to do the community land trust.’ A bunch of us sitting around the table and we’re like, ‘Are we going to do this?’ But it was also like, ‘You know that this is going to take a lot of time and work.’ And everybody was like, ‘Yes.’”
Nola says almost everyone in that photo is still involved.
“If you get to know GES, there’s just such a history of exclusion and pollution and so many things that… neighbors are just like, Enough. Ya basta, let’s move. Let’s do it ourselves.”
Tierra Colectiva CLT (TCCLT) was born as the structure through which residents could own and steward land for the community’s benefit. It’s governed by a development board consisting of one third TCCLT homeowners, one third GES neighbors at large, and one third development experts. All members of this development board are appointed by the GES Coalition’s member-elected central board.
Why focus so much on building a robust, truly democratic governance structure? Because…
“Nobody’s going to do it for us in the way that we need, even good partners, even a nonprofit partner that might have the best intentions. If they’re not informed and led by actual community members, it’s just not going to work.”
Launching the CLT was one thing; the next challenge became making sure it actually leads to homeownership.
After years of developing Tierra Colectiva, some of the people most connected to the land trust still couldn’t access homeownership through it.
“We’ve had people that started the land trust and served on the board and been part of things for a long time that still haven’t been able to purchase a home in the land trust. So yeah, we’re directly working with families, figuring out what are the gaps, trying to also figure out different ways of proving income when those sort of traditional ways aren’t working.”
So the organization began looking more closely at the barriers between community ownership and mortgage access.
“That’s another challenge that we’ve had with traditional banks, is they’re not going to look at utility bills and cell phone bills and record of paying rent, and all these things that we know people are doing, but it doesn’t count if they can’t use that as evidence of their ability to pay.”
Now the organization is asking a practical question:
What would it take to build a mortgage product that works for all the families Tierra Colectiva was created to support?
The answer to that is currently in the works. Collaborating with the CDFI Impact Development Fund as a potential loan originator, GES Coalition is focused on a 30-year mortgage product designed for CLT homeownership. GES is seeking capital for the fund, talking with philanthropic and financial partners, and exploring structures that can support long-term lending.
“Our commitment has been, from the beginning when we started the land trust: we’re not just serving people that the system already serves — we’re going to serve everyone in the community, especially that are being displaced… That’s why we are even working on this.”
Nola is clear that this work is far from simple.
“It feels like everything we do, we’re kind of reinventing the wheel and having to create our own structure for this. So it takes a lot of staff time and the startup funds to get that going. We have to write our own terms for the loan, for instance… The other part is finding capital, so that is a whole nother process.
What else takes time and dedication is continually translating the model itself. Outside the community, the organization often finds itself explaining the model to lenders, developers, and other key players who may be unfamiliar with CLTs or hold misconceptions about them. Within the community, Tierra Colectiva’s leaders spend significant time building trust and helping residents understand a form of ownership that’s different from conventional homebuying.
“The education is constant. We just always are having to be out there, be answering questions, be educating folks. It’s not like you can understand it in one hour-long session. I mean, I remember the process of learning about community land trusts and how many misunderstandings you can have at first. And we’re modifying it — things change over time also.
Yeah, it does take involvement and quite a bit of trust to really have the level of success to address displacement, which is not an easy thing to do.”
This ongoing community engagement is all part of organizing, the engine driving the CLT.
“People are confused by who we are because we develop and we organize. But we’re trying to just embrace that, to be like, ‘Yes, we do both things.’ … The organizing work is continuing to feed the development work and vice versa.”
Organizing, Nola says, leads to deeper democracy.
“We really talk about it as leadership development now, and that entering as a member is kind of the first step towards more and more leadership development and participation and involvement. People that are members, you can always go in and out. You can get more involved in a committee and then step back when you can’t, and still be a member and you’re still part of the movement.
The beautiful thing now is that once you have those structures in place, there are new people coming up. We always talked about that — we never want to be dependent on one leader.”
This democratic infrastructure built for the long-term also supports the CLT’s work beyond housing. Tierra Colectiva is now organizing for shared ownership of a 92-acre publicly owned parcel, advocating for solutions to a proposed data center, and maintaining a food forest as its first non-housing land stewardship project.
For Nola, this breadth of projects reflects what happens when a community-led organization follows the people’s priorities.
“I think when you have a very place-led effort, [like] localized CLTs, they end up doing a variety of things, not necessarily just housing or just homeownership, but all the things that a community land trust could potentially do.”
This is what GES Coalition is constantly finding.
“When we’re allowed to vision and really determine our own path and what the priorities are, communities are like, We want to do it all. Now that we can do that, we want to do that too. And look at this parcel, we should buy that and do this…
Now that we’re exploring all these different forms of community ownership and that other places are experimenting and doing those things, we’re kind of like, hmm, let’s hybrid, let’s do a co-op with the land trust — what are all the variety of solutions that we could do?
But I think now the challenge is priorities because we can’t do everything. And for me, challenges are just having the staff and capacity to do it all, and being able to match our growth.”
Still, something has changed in the neighborhood.
“Honestly, the biggest surprise is that it’s working. I mean, we all remember when it was just an idea. So, to see people stably housed, to see us additionally acquiring land, we just won a land banking award from the state, we’re working on our next commercial parcel, so it’s sort of like, wow, we actually did it.”
The land trust is well past being just an idea — this community has become unstoppable. Residents are watching for opportunities to see what could be collectively owned or protected next.
Nola describes this shift in how residents see their own power.
“Everybody has just become so savvy... That shift in feeling of, This is happening to us to like, Oh, we could buy that, we could do that. If somebody else isn’t going to do it, we can do it. We’re not going to wait around for somebody else to do it. ”
For the community ownership field, Tierra Colectiva proves that community ownership work has cascading effects and interconnected impacts. Every solution uncovers the next problem to solve, and the same democratic organizing process produces the next innovation. A land trust can create community control over land, but if some residents still can’t access financing, the work has to move into solutions that address those barriers.
“It’s never just one project. It’s always everything that’s around that project and then how that affects the next project and how that leverages this or that… Community structures for democratic leadership and governance make a way to continue to modify and be relevant.”
As the organization keeps implementing and innovating, they’re committed to always centering the same question: What isn’t working for everyone in the community, and what must be built so it can?
In this story, therefore, community ownership is much broader than this one model. It’s an ongoing practice of building systemic solutions that prioritize residents’ stability, self-determination, and leadership.
To learn more about GES Coalition’s Tierra Colectiva CLT, or to get in touch with the COLA Lab, check out the links below.
Learn more about GES Coalition’s Tierra Colectiva CLT
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