[raybb]

Community land trusts, cooperatives, nonprofits, universities, local government, etc.

The problem is always financing. If you're going to own a place you need a lot of upfront capital. If you own a place and plan to maximize rent increases it's easy to leverage your new asset to buy more properties. But if you just want to keep it near cost then you need a new infusion of capital for each new property. So, by their nature such endeavors don't grow as fast as rent maximizing landlord can grow.

[fooker]

The problem is not capital here. Universities and governments have quite a bit of capital. They could do this in a larger scale.

It's more about risk management. Do you want your university to be disbanded or your local government bankrupt if there is a war or natural disaster, or even a standard city block fire.

I assure you wars and natural disasters are not that uncommon in the grand scheme of things. That's why we have people or corporations with a higher appetite for risk assume the risk. These entities, unfortunately, don't always have your best interests in mind.

[raybb]

What cities in the US have the capital to do this at a large scale? Risk management is certainly a part of it but every discussion here in SF and broadly in the CLT movement is about how to get capital access.

A university endowment or a city's tax revenue is legally and structurally earmarked. They can't just liquidate those assets to buy for local real estate. For the non-profits and community land trusts actually doing this work, securing patient, low-cost capital is absolutely the primary bottleneck.

The high leverage of private landlords actually makes them more vulnerable to systemic shocks. Meanwhile, non-market housing models (like land trusts) don't over-leverage their properties, which is exactly why they historically have much lower default rates during crises.

Given the option of landlords making bank for their risk and then getting a government bailout when there's an economic shock or having more housing decommoddified I'd take the latter. There's very little housing in the US that is under these alternative structures so at the very least I'd encourage more experimentation with them.

[fooker]

More experimentation sounds great.

Most of the knowledge we have about what works and what doesn't is from decades ago.