Beyond the Deal: How to Build a Community Ownership Ecosystem That Lasts
Insights from Cityscapes Summit 2026 Session | Understanding Ecosystems to Support Community-Owned Real Estate | Speakers: Yerin Cho (Center for Community Investment), Nola Miguel (GES Coalition--Tierra Colectiva CLT), Ahmed Mori (University of Miami), Helen Leung (LA Más)
Across the country, a quiet shift is underway. In neighborhoods facing displacement, pollution, and speculative development, community-based organizations are no longer satisfied with isolated development projects and advocacy. They want to transform their communities completely while making sure that the residents, business owners, nonprofits and stakeholders have a say in the future of their communities and a pathway to collectively benefit from the investments coming in. Turning that ambition into something lasting requires legal networks, capital relationships, organizing infrastructure, and shared knowledge that allow community ownership to become the norm rather than a one-off victory. It also requires making these models feel familiar and accessible, so that community ownership is understood not as an alternative or niche approach, but as a practical and expected way for communities to shape and benefit from development.
This need for strong community ownership ecosystems was at the center of the Cityscapes session, Understanding Ecosystems to Support Community-Owned Real Estate. Practitioners Helen Leung from LA MÁS (Los Angeles), Globeville Elyria Swansea Coalition, Nola Miguel at Tierra Colectiva Community Land Trust (Denver), and Ahmed Mori at the Community Ownership Learning Action Lab at the University of Miami, in partnership with Yerin Cho at Center for Community Investment shared how they are doing just that.
Reframe the Question: It Is Not About Projects. It Is About Ecosystems.
Even as community ownership of real estate is gaining momentum across the county, most organizations working in community ownership focus on the deal directly in front of them. But the speakers at this session asked a different question: what conditions in your city allow community ownership projects to keep launching, sustaining, and multiplying over time?
Researchers at the University of Miami have been mapping those conditions across multiple cities, cataloging more than 300 community ownership organizations and estimated the value of community-held assets nationally at between $10 and $11 billion. That figure represents only a fraction of what is possible. Their framework shifts focus from actors to functions: what roles need to be filled in a community ownership ecosystem, such as base building, capital organizing, technical assistance, and bridge building, and it does not matter which organization fills them.
This reframe has real practical value. A community land trust, a tenant organizing group, a CDFI, and a university research center can all be part of the same ecosystem without duplicating each other. When one type of organization is missing, others can step in.
What this means for your work: Before launching a new initiative or applying for a grant, map the ecosystem around you. Ask which functions already exist locally and which are absent. You may find that the gap is not in project development but in legal technical assistance, in intermediary coordination, or in bridge building between sectors. Filling that gap may be more valuable than adding another project.
Learn From Minneapolis: Infrastructure Before Scale
Before 2020, there was one real estate investment co-op operating in the Twin Cities. Since then, at least four more have launched and become operational. University of Miami researchers conducted social network analysis of the relationships supporting those co-ops and found something instructive. A visible core of intermediary organizations had adapted their roles to serve the emerging field: legal technical assistance providers, community development organizations, commercial realtors who formalized their practices to serve co-ops, and cultural preservation groups that saw investment co-ops as tools for community goals.
Newer co-ops entering the ecosystem were reusing established relationship pathways, connecting to legal, philanthropic, and technical resources through channels earlier projects had already built. The researchers call this ecosystem institutionalization: the field developing enough shared infrastructure that each new project does not have to start from scratch.
By contrast, in Chicago, where housing co-ops have been growing since 2019, that intermediary infrastructure had not yet consolidated. The comparison reveals a clear pattern: cities that invest in the connective tissue between projects, not just in individual projects, are the ones where community ownership scales.
The Center for Community Investment's Framework offer a structured way to audit your local ecosystem and identify which functions are missing or underdeveloped. It is a useful starting point for any organization trying to understand where it sits in the broader landscape.frameworks offer a structured way to audit your local ecosystem and identify which functions are missing or underdeveloped. It is a useful starting point for any organization trying to understand where it sits in the broader landscape.
Organizing Is Not a Phase You Graduate From
One of the clearest messages across every city in this session was this: community organizing and community ownership development are not sequential. They run in parallel, reinforce each other, and should both be treated as permanent infrastructure.
In Denver's Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea neighborhoods, among the most polluted zip codes in the country, the Globeville Elyria Swansea Coalition spent years doing neighborhood-level organizing around small business support and local advocacy before displacement hit in 2015. When half of the micro-entrepreneurs they worked with were displaced within months, the organization did not pivot away from organizing. It added real estate development as a new expression of the same theory of change. Today, the Coalition and its affiliated Tierra Colectiva Community Land Trust simultaneously run tenant organizing, environmental justice campaigns, and leadership development alongside their development work. The leaders emerging from active campaigns, including a current fight against a data center sited next to senior housing and a recreation center, are the same people moving into governance roles in the land trust.
In Los Angeles, LA MÁS built a model where community members govern the organization's real estate priorities through an open, translated, bimonthly process. Rather than seeking community approval project by project, they co-created threshold criteria with residents upfront. Every acquisition decision must meet those criteria: minimum affordability levels, neighborhood rootedness, and displacement risk. That allows the real estate team to move fast and compete with corporate buyers on escrow timelines while the governance structure keeps every decision grounded in community priorities. The trust LA MÁS draws on was built over years before a single property was purchased. The real estate work runs on that foundation.
What this means for your work: If your organization is considering entering community ownership, do not treat organizing as a warm-up you will eventually phase out. Structure time and budget for it as an ongoing line item. Build governance structures that give organizing leaders real decision-making power. The cities with the strongest ecosystems have organizations doing both at once.
Creative Capital Is Not a Workaround. It Is the Strategy.
Practitioners at this session were candid about the financing reality: the capital landscape is not designed for community ownership. Program-related investments move too slowly. Public money carries Fair Housing Act restrictions that prevent organizations from prioritizing long-term residents. Traditional lenders may not understand community ownership structures. And capital is often structured for a single project rather than for the organization, leaving groups underfunded for operations and future acquisitions. The organizations making progress have stopped waiting for the system to catch up. Here is what they are doing instead.
Co-ownership with mission-aligned lenders. LA MÁS partnered with Self-Help Federal Credit Union, which co-invests in properties as an owner rather than a lender, providing below-market financing in exchange for a buyout over ten years. The organization gets access to affordable capital. Self-Help retains a stake until LA MÁS is ready to buy them out.
Committing to escrow before all funding is secured. By entering a purchase agreement before every dollar is identified, LA MÁS creates urgency that moves funders who otherwise move slowly. This approach unlocked a first-ever program-related investment from a family foundation across four separate acquisitions.
Individual investor campaigns. A community-facing investment campaign offering 1% interest over five years has raised nearly $200,000 from individual community members, creating flexible capital that can move quickly.
Infrastructure mitigation grants. In Denver, the GES Coalition seeded its initial acquisition fund with a $2 million housing mitigation grant tied to the I-70 expansion project. When a major infrastructure project comes to a vulnerable neighborhood, that is leverage. Organizations should pursue mitigation commitments before ground breaks.
What this means for your work: Build relationships with CDFIs, philanthropies, public agencies, and individual investors simultaneously. Use each completed deal as proof of concept for the next one. The organizations scaling fastest are treating capital strategy as an ongoing practice, not a one-time problem to solve.
Four Things to Do Right Now
Map your ecosystem by function. Use the Center for Community Investment's Cramework to identify which functions exist in your city and which do not. Look for gaps in legal, technical assistance, intermediary coordination, capital access, and bridge building. Gaps in those areas may be more important to address than adding new projects. to identify which functions exist in your city and which do not. Look for gaps in legal, technical assistance, intermediary coordination, capital access, and bridge building. Gaps in those areas may be more important to address than adding new projects.
Fund intermediaries, not just deals. The Twin Cities data showed that ecosystem health depends on organizations that connect legal resources to co-ops, link philanthropy to community organizers, and move technical assistance where it is needed. These connective-tissue organizations often go under funded because they do not produce units or close loans. That needs to change.
Put organizing in the budget permanently. If you are a funder, require it. If you are a practitioner, protect it. The communities with the strongest ecosystems had organizations that were simultaneously developing leaders, running issue campaigns, and building real estate portfolios. These activities do not compete. They compound.
Work to normalize community ownership models. A 30-year mortgage is an enormously complex financial instrument that feels simple because generations have been taught it is normal. Community land trusts, real estate investment co-ops, and housing cooperatives are not more complicated. They are simply less familiar. Investing in popular education, youth curriculum, and local storytelling builds the cultural foundation these models need to spread.
More about NGIN’s Small and Midsized Cities Hub
Cityscapes Summit is New Growth Innovation Network's (NGIN) biennial economic development conference, bringing together community, economic development, and city leaders to ignite innovations and power economies. This work is supported through NGIN's Small and Midsized Cities (SMC) Hub, a program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that offers a suite of programs, technical assistance, resources, and tools to support economic and community leaders build healthy, thriving communities in cities with populations ranging from 50,000 to 500,000.
To access upcoming events, resources, and peer learning opportunities designed for small and mid-sized cities, consider joining the SMC Hub Community of Practice. Membership is free and open to practitioners nationwide. Join here.
