Hannah Anousheh ’15 in front of the first building purchased by the land trust she helped found
For Hannah Anousheh ’15 one of the sweetest victories of her career so far came in February 2024: the land trust where she works purchased its first residential property, one she hopes will have ripple effects in her community.
A Carleton political science major who earned her MS in urban planning from Pratt, Anousheh was hired by Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation in 2019 to explore the possibility of starting a community land trust. What resulted, the East New York Community Land Trust (ENYCLT), went to bat for one of the building’s tenants, who’d been pushing the landlord to improve conditions for years. The land trust convinced the landlord to sell and raised $1.7 million through donations and low-interest loans to put toward the purchase. Next ENYCLT will renovate and convert the 20-unit property to a cooperative, without displacing any of its low-income residents. They’ll all become cooperative owners. That is, they’ll own the building while the land trust will own the land it sits on—forever.
That’s no small feat, given the context of where the building’s located: New York City, where the median home price is $785,000 and rent averages $3,489 a month, and East New York, which has the 47th highest median income of all the city’s 59 neighborhoods. “It’s one of the last neighborhoods in Brooklyn that hasn’t yet experienced the gentrification and displacement that many other neighborhoods across New York City have,” says Anousheh, ENYCLT’s founding director. “Our goal is to make sure that the longtime working-class residents can stay in the neighborhood.”
The mechanisms of the land trust are designed to do just that. After the building is converted to a co-op, its residents will likely pay what they did as renters—around $1,200 a month, including maintenance fees and the mortgage, which is being subsidized by public funds. A flip tax will be enacted to discourage speculation and resale restrictions will be in place. “When you sell, a percentage of the proceeds have to stay in the building to help ensure it’s well maintained and stays affordable,” Anousheh explains, “and the longer you stay, the greater percentage of the sale proceeds you get to take home. It’s balancing helping people build generational wealth while making sure that the next generation can afford a home.”
Anousheh links her passion for affordable housing for low-income New Yorkers to her upbringing. Her parents remain in the Manhattan one-bedroom she grew up in, thanks to rent-stabilization regulations that cap their monthly rent at just over $1,000. “My dad worked in a restaurant my whole life, and that was possible because we weren’t being gouged for housing.”
She also credits her parents’ example. “They’ve been activists and organizers throughout their lives. They taught me from a young age that you have to have a kind of delusional optimism when the cards are stacked against us as the working class—and that you can win when you fight.”