Housing that’s not just for the wealthy?

Lillian Zavatsky, left, and Elizabeth Smith are among those involved in organizing a new Northern Berkshire Community Land Trust. Zavatsky, the group’s president, says it aims to help keep housing affordable. Joan K. Lentini photo

 

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

NORTH ADAMS, Mass.

Victorian houses with slate roofs, community-supported farms, artist studios in old mills, and downtown shops with apartments above: In the smallest city in Massachusetts, North Adams has a variety of living spaces.

But how many have local people living in them year-round?
The city has gone through layers of transformation in 40 years. The mill economy that had powered the community for generations disappeared in the 1980s, and since the pandemic, housing needs have intensified, becoming a central focus of conversation in the Berkshires and far beyond.

“The housing crisis is national,” said Lillian Zavatsky, president of the newly forming Northern Berkshire Community Land Trust.

A land trust, its organizers say, could act as a counterweight to market forces that are making the region’s housing supply increasingly unaffordable.

Zavatsky and four others in the community have formed a volunteer board. Angie Gonzalez, a doula, and her partner, Cody Chamberlain, who brings a background with land trusts and economic development in Boston, join Craig Feuerzay, a local builder and contractor, and Max Prum, who is involved in agroforestry and conservation and lives in the town of Florida.
The effort to set up a local land trust has grown out of conversations in two North Adams kitchens, Zavatsky said. She was talking with friends around her table about how hard it was for many people they knew to find a way to live here.

Virginia Riehl, a management consultant with extensive experience in the health care industry, was holding conversations of her own.

“She started asking people about the biggest challenge they faced,” Zavatsky said, “and everyone kept saying ‘housing.’ And she said, ‘OK, if everyone I talk with is concerned about this, I’ll learn about it.’”

Together, Riehl, Zavatsky and their friends and neighbors formed the North Adams Community Housing Organization, or NACHO, a grassroots group that’s working on policy research, fix-up programs for local houses and outreach in the community.

And now Zavatsky is focusing on practical, hands-on and long-term tools to make housing more affordable — and keep it that way.

“North Adams has a lot going for it,” she said, noting its open ridges for hiking and a growing community of artists and arts organizations.

The city also has low property values compared with the rest of the state, and this has made it attractive to outside speculators who will buy properties for investment and drive housing prices up, she explained.

“We want North Adams to benefit,” Zavatsky said. “But we don’t want people to be displaced.”
Housing prices in the Berkshires have risen sharply from their pre-pandemic levels. In 2022, Zavatsky noted, the median sale price of a home in North Adams was $217,000 -- up from $125,000 in 2018. She wants to preserve more affordable places for people who want to live and work here.

In North Adams, Zavatsky traced a familiar pattern: People living at a distance buy a property and turn it into a short-term rental or an Airbnb. Although that can be a valuable investment for the owner in terms of revenue, she said, it has a cost to the community. On a winter night, she can see rows of houses standing dark and empty.

A land trust can encourage people to buy where they want to live, Zavatsky said, and grow neighborhoods where people can get to know one another.

As a nonprofit, the trust holds resources in common. When someone buys a house, Zavatsky explained, the trust buys the land, and the homeowner buys the house. The results in a lower up-front cost for the home buyer, who then leases the land from the trust, often on a 99-year lease that provides protection and stability.

People can still build equity and make a profit when they sell their home, Zavatsky said, but a land trust can help give the community some insulation against a turbulent housing market.

 

A model from agriculture
It can take a generous person to appreciate the value of the exchange, said Elizabeth Smith, sharing elderberry tea with Zavatsky in her own kitchen.

Smith and her husband, Sam, are retired farmers who founded the Caretaker Farm community land trust in Williamstown. They seeded and grew one of the earliest sustainable, regenerative farms in the area, beginning in 1969. Under their stewardship, Caretaker Farm evolved into one of the first farms in the nation to practice the model of community-supported agriculture, in which customers typically pay in advance for shares of each year’s harvest.

And when it came time to retire, they created a cooperative structure to preserve their farm and pass it on to a new generation of farmers in 2006. They wanted to make sure the land would continue as a farm, Smith said, and that the new family of farmers could live on the land. She and her husband needed to support themselves — and they needed and wanted to support the local community that was supporting and sustaining them.

Caretaker had grown with a deeply rooted group of local families who came regularly, first to a farm stand and bakery in the 1970s and ‘80s. As the community-supported agriculture or CSA model emerged, the Smiths brought in families in their community to imagine and create the form of the new farm, and then local families held yearly shares in the farm. They would come weekly, June to October, to fill a bag with fresh greens and carrots so vigorous they twined together, and to pick snap peas and snapdragons — as they still do today.

But while the farm has persisted, Smith said, she and Sam have seen the area changing around them.

“The community we joined in 1965, when we moved here, is not the community we live in now,” she said.

“Our neighbors were farmers, school teachers, people who worked for town departments,” she recalled. “The person who dug the foundation of our house, I had taught his son in elementary school. We had a grange, and local shops, and we knew everyone who ran the shops, and you could get everything downtown — paint, appliances, health care, everything was available locally.”

Inspired and guided by founders of the Schumacher Center in Great Barrington, the Smiths have worked with Williamstown Rural Lands and with Equity Trust in Amherst to preserve the Caretaker farm and barnyard, the land and the living spaces. (There are two houses on the farm property.)

They tapped into a widespread movement. There are 225 community land trusts across the country, according the Grounded Solutions Network. Board members of the new the Northern Berkshire Community Land Trust have connections with some similar organizations around the Northeast.

“A number of us came together who are familiar with land trusts from different places,” Zavatsky said.

Chamberlain has served on the board of the Dudley Street Initiative in Boston. In the late 1980s, the diverse neighborhood organized to assert community influence over a critical mass of 1,300 parcels of abandoned land. Today, the group holds 228 units of affordable housing, shops, urban farms, community gardens and a playground.

 

A growing movement
Board members of the new Northern Berkshire are imagining the local possibilities.
“We’re early days, and we’re researching,” Zavatsky said. “We want something that will work here.”

They are creating a structure and guidelines for the group. They will have membership — open to anyone interested in the idea or curious about the group, she said — and the organization will operate on democratic decisions made by the membership and the board.

They are incorporating under the umbrella of the Southern Berkshire Community Land Trust, but the new organization will have the freedom to make its own structures. Its founders are talking with people from many perspectives to learn the local ecosystem, from representatives of Greylock Federal Credit Union to Ken Kuttner of the Williamstown Planning Board.

As the Northern Berkshire group comes together, land trusts are gaining momentum across western Massachusetts.

Cooperatives across the region are coming together in a new Valley Alliance for Land Equity, said Rebecca Fletcher, the loan and outreach officer for Northampton at the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast.

Fletcher said she and Jim Oldham, executive director at Equity Trust, had been talking to people in different parts of the region who were all working on similar efforts and experiencing similar challenges. So they put together a two-day retreat whose participants could focus on issues related to land, housing and justice.

“We hung out together at Wolman Hill for two days,” she said, laughing, “and we created a vision, and we created a mission, and we created some big picture ideas about what the organization would do.

“We were brainstorming together, and nobody would stop at lunchtime. It was really a sweet group to be with.”

The Valley Alliance for Land Equity brings together Equity Trust and four community land trusts — Amherst, Franklin County, Valley, and the emerging Lower Valley trust — and four housing cooperatives, Flo-Op, Valley Housing, Willow Permanent Real Estate and Wellspring.

The alliance’s leaders are focusing their energy for now on incorporating as a new nonprofit, knitting together a strategic plan and a stewardship policy, Fletcher said. The group has received grants for two years in a row from the state Root Cause Solutions Exchange.

“We just are about to get another $70,000 of funding to work on all of that,” Fletcher said. “And that’s going to help us hire a half-time staff person to help all of this work go forward.”

 

One house at a time
Northern Berkshire Community Land Trust also will focus this year to create a plan to grow, Zavatsky said. And land trusts expand in different ways.

“We’re creating the structure of the land trust to hold land in the community for generations,” she said. “How we grow depends on what people want.”

Zavatsky plans to begin with one house — her own. A land trust may begin one house at a time, she said. As a family is looking for a place to live, they may agree to work with the trust, to buy a house at a lower cost because the trust buys the land.

Sometimes a land trust will work with local organizations like Habitat for Humanity, and sometimes the land trust will build housing or renovate and re-imagine existing structures. Sometimes a city or state will donate houses to the trust. This can save a city money if it has houses or buildings in disrepair, Zavatsky explained.

If the owner has failed to care for the property for a long time, to the point that the buildings are unsafe, then the city has some legal recourse to ensure repairs are made and the owner pays for them. Sometimes in that process the city ends up owning a house, at which point the land trust potentially can help.

Some large and well-known land trusts began this way, Zavatsky said. The Champlain trust in Burlington, Vt., one of the largest in the country, the Dudley Street trust in Boston and Cooper Square in New York all have grown with support from their city governments.
A land trust may also have resources for repairing and renovating homes and supporting its members, Zavatsky said.

Oldham, the Equity Trust executive director, explained that a land trust’s relationship with the land and the owner’s relationship with the house are usually separate. In effect, the land trust buys the whole property and then sells the house to the owner. The trust holds the land, and the homeowner may have their own mortgage on the house.

That means it can be challenging for someone who already owns a home to bring their house and land into a land trust, Zavatsky said. But it’s possible if their bank will work with them, she added.

Being part of the land trust will influence how much the owner can ask when they decide to sell, and different land trusts have different equations for determining the value of each property’s share of the trust, Zavatsky said. The new Northern Berkshire trust is pondering these questions now.

On the other hand, a homeowner in a land trust may pay less in property tax. Zavatsky said that rate will vary by community, just as tax assessments vary by town, and Smith said that in some towns, a home in a land trust may be assessed at the value the land trust allows — in much the same way that farmland often can be taxed on its value as a farm, and not at the higher value for which it could be sold for development.

Smith said she has watched the strengthening of land trusts across the country, and she has wanted for more than 20 years to see one take firm hold locally.

Moments come, she said, when a new energy grows and makes something happen. Something that didn’t seem possible catches a spark — and suddenly it’s beginning.

“This is not for a year, or an election cycle, or even for a decade,” Zavatsky said. “This is for decades.”

She is settling in for the long term and letting the land trust put out shoots.
“We have time,” she said.