On a plot of land in western Connecticut resides a small group of tenants who are doing housing a little differently. “ We’re all involved and invested in the same thing, which is safe housing for ourselves and our family,” says Wandy Luna, 48, president of one of the six Brookside Housing Cooperatives, the oldest cooperative housing project in Connecticut.
Brookside, located in Waterbury, was founded in 1991 to provide permanently affordable homes to residents who were dealing with the ramifications of the deindustrialization of their community. It’s a limited equity housing cooperative (LEHC) operating on a community land trust (CLT). In layman’s terms, a LEHC is an alternative housing model where one buys shares of a property instead of an individual unit. A community land trust is an organization (usually a nonprofit with community participation in the governance) that holds the land permanently in trust for the good of the community, often to ensure permanently affordable housing. Co-ops are managed by a joint governance of elected tenants who meet monthly. Each of the six housing cooperatives elects its officers (president, vice president, secretary and treasurer) for its own leadership, and each also sends a representative to a cross-cooperative space called “All Committee,” where common concerns among the co-ops are raised and tackled. A layer above that is the community land trust, where each co-op has a representative on the board. There are also three seats for the parent organization, Naugatuck Valley Project (NVP) and six additional nonresident seats for local community members.
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