Cooper Square Community Land Trust

The Cooper Square Community Land Trust incorporated in 1991 to hold the land the City of New York transferred to the community under the implementation of the Cooper Square Alternate Plan. The Land Trust holds 23 buildings and more than 300 apartments as permanent affordable housing, with a Mutual Housing Association operating the buildings as limited-equity cooperatives.

The Land Trust emerged directly from the Cooper Square Committee’s 1959 fight against Robert Moses and the Title I clearance program. The Committee spent three decades pressing the city to adopt its alternate plan rather than the original slum-clearance proposal, and the Land Trust is the institutional mechanism through which the neighborhood holds the ground it won. Residents sit on the Land Trust board, approve major decisions, and set the terms under which buildings transfer between tenants.

The Cooper Square model has served as a reference case for community-land-trust development across the country, including the East Harlem, Brownsville, and Hunts Point land-trust initiatives that have launched in the last decade. The Land Trust staffs training and technical-assistance programs for those efforts.