Building Economic Democracy Through Community-Owned Real Estate

Editors’ Note: This article was originally written for the Summer 2025 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine, “Land Justice: From Private Ownership to Community Stewardship.”

For people working toward systems change, the connection between neoliberalism-fueled wealth gaps, a declining social safety net, and the erosion of democratic institutions is perhaps clear. That a slumlord, emblematic of this neoliberal era, who built his fortune in part by exploiting low-income tenants, is now president feels almost too on the nose. As federal institutions crumble, the urgency to build local economic democracy from the ground up has never been greater.

Economic democracy serves as an oppositional framework to the extractive, hierarchical nature of capitalism. It shifts decision-making power from corporations and investors to workers and communities, ensuring that wealth and resources are stewarded collectively rather than concentrated in the hands of a few.

My work over the last decade at The Guild has been about building economic democracy across the pillars of land and labor. The Guild is a worker-owned cooperative, developing community-owned models of land, housing, and real estate—democratizing ownership and control across the two major wealth-building tools in this country.

When housing is treated as a speculative asset rather than a human right…we end up with a system that prioritizes extraction over wellbeing.

Our vision for economic justice is not just about increasing wages or creating more affordable housing—it’s about shifting notions of ownership itself to interrupt cycles of harm. Without community control over assets and infrastructure, marginalized groups will always be vulnerable to displacement, exploitation, and economic precarity. Our work aims to decommodify land and housing, while building community wealth, ensuring communities of color and working-class communities can shape their own economic futures.

The Cost of Commodification

At the root of the multiple intersecting crises—or polycrisis—in which we find ourselves is the relentless commodification of everything essential to our survival as people. When housing is treated as a speculative asset rather than a human right, when labor and natural resources are valued only for their profit potential rather than their role in sustaining communities, we end up with a system that prioritizes extraction over wellbeing.

The Guild is based in Atlanta, which has the highest percentage of institutional investor ownership of single-family rental real estate—25 percent as of 2022, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study. This wave of institutional purchases, which we saw coming, has driven up home prices, made homeownership unattainable for many working-class families, and led to skyrocketing rents and evictions. And now, the city that has been known as the “Black Mecca” is no longer a majority-Black city.

This isn’t just a local issue, and it didn’t begin in the last decade. Today’s displacement is the inevitable culmination of generations of policy choices—redlining, urban renewal, and the dismantling of public housing—which systematically destabilized Black communities and other communities of color, while simultaneously devaluing the land in those neighborhoods. Now, as capital returns to those same neighborhoods, the people who endured decades of disinvestment are being pushed out.

The real estate industry has long wielded an outsized influence on economic and political systems, shaping policies to preserve capital at the expense of communities. As scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has written, “The real-estate industry created the idea that Black homeowners posed a risk to the housing market and then profited from financial tools promoted as mitigating that risk.”

From predatory lending practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis to policies that funnel public money into policing instead of housing, the industry has dictated whose lives—and whose neighborhoods—are deemed valuable.

In 2023, Atlanta allocated a meager $8 million to the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, while simultaneously authorizing $90 million for a hypermilitarized police training facility known as “Cop City” (the cost of which has since climbed to $115 million), with a majority of funds coming from public coffers.

This dissonance about what constitutes public safety is not unique to Atlanta; public officials across the country treat the housing crisis as a byproduct of “market forces,” ignoring the implications of policies that perpetuate cycles of structural violence.

The problem, then, isn’t just affordability—it’s ownership and control. Who owns our neighborhoods? Who decides how land is used? Who benefits from rising property values?

Attempting to Flip the Script

The Guild focuses on interrupting these cycles of harm that begin with the commodification of land. We believe that the people who live in a neighborhood should have a stake in its future—not be pushed out when investment arrives. That belief is at the core of our Community Stewardship Trust (CST), a model that allows residents in a zip code to co-own and steward land together.

Instead of being displaced as property values rise, neighbors get to stay in place, benefit financially, and have decision-making power over what happens in their community.

Structured as a public benefit corporation, with residents as community shareholders, the CST acquires vacant, abandoned, or underutilized buildings, and after a process of codesigning with the community, redevelops them into assets that meet the community’s needs.

Our Community Stewardship Trust…allows residents in a zip code to co-own and steward land together.

For example, one of the first properties in our first Atlanta CST was a vacant 7,000-square-foot commercial building at 918 Dill Avenue. That building—instead of being flipped for high-end development—is being redeveloped into a 21,000-square-foot, three-story building with two stories of affordable housing above a neighborhood grocery store, with commercial kitchens for food entrepreneurs, offices, and event space.

Excess income from the building (and others like it in the CST) goes back to community shareholders as dividends. As property values increase, that increase is reflected in the appreciation of share prices, creating a pathway for working-class residents to build wealth. Perhaps more importantly, community shareholders get to decide what projects get developed in their neighborhoods.

Building a Capital Continuum for Community-Owned Real Estate

Real estate development doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it’s shaped by a vast ecosystem of policies, financial structures, and market dynamics. Shifting from an extractive model to a regenerative, community-centered one requires engaging with every part of this system.

That means challenging the way appraisals value land, rethinking how banks and lenders finance projects, disrupting real estate speculation, resisting the ways real estate interests line up with the carceral system, and advocating for tax policies that prioritize collective ownership over private profit. Without a holistic approach, even the best-intentioned interventions can be undermined by the entrenched forces of the status quo.

Reclaiming land and democratizing real estate requires long-term, flexible capital—not short-term, project-based funding. Philanthropy must shift from small, one-time grants to bold, multiyear operating grants that allow organizations engaged in systems-change work to build lasting infrastructure. We are not just filling gaps or running pilot programs—we are repairing generations of harm while simultaneously building new models of land and housing governance. The scale of disinvestment that communities of color have endured cannot be undone with piecemeal funding. This is a long game, and the capital that fuels it must reflect that reality.

Beyond traditional grantmaking, foundations and impact investors must align their full portfolios, including endowments, toward systems change. If philanthropic capital is still invested in extractive real estate models (like real estate investment trusts) while funding equity initiatives on the side, it is ineffective at best.

Beyond philanthropy, community development financial institutions (CDFIs) must step up. CDFIs were created to finance projects in disinvested communities, offering an alternative to traditional banks that have historically denied Black, Brown, and low-income borrowers access to credit. But over time, many CDFIs have drifted toward risk-averse, conventional underwriting practices—replicating the very barriers they were meant to address.

CDFIs still largely assess risk through a traditional, extractive lens, prioritizing creditworthiness, collateral, and financial track records over community impact. What could a CDFI’s loan terms look like if it priced in the risk of continued displacement, disinvestment, and instability that results from failing to invest in community-led solutions? Longer repayment terms and lower interest rates are one part of the solution, but CDFIs must actively prioritize cooperatives, land trusts, and other shared equity models that build wealth collectively.

Policy and Public Investment Matter

While mission-aligned private capital can play a role in advancing community ownership, true scale requires public investment and structural policy changes. In the face of federal abandonment, cities must step up and move beyond simply subsidizing affordability within the existing speculative market, and instead actively support alternative ownership models that ensure long-term community stability.

One critical step is incentivizing community land ownership through strategies like land banking, public land transfers, and dedicated acquisition funding that prioritize local stewardship over private speculation. Additionally, zoning and tax policies must shift to discourage corporate real estate hoarding and speculation, which drive up property values while displacing long-time residents. And public resources must be directed toward permanently affordable housing, leveraging subsidies, low-cost loan programs, and community-controlled financing mechanisms that prioritize stability and equity over short-term profit.

Without public investment in democratic ownership, the affordability crisis will continue to be treated as an isolated issue rather than a structural failure of the market-driven housing system. As long as policy remains tethered to speculative development, wealthy investors—not community members—will dictate who gets to stay and who is forced out.

Narrative Change Is Part of the Fight

One of the biggest obstacles to systemic change is how we think about land, housing, and real estate ownership itself. To scale economic democracy, we need a cultural and political shift—one that redefines housing as a public good, not an investment vehicle, and one that challenges the deep-rooted myth of private ownership as the only path to wealth and stability.

The so-called American Dream—built on exclusion, racialized dispossession, and a system that privileges profit over people—has never been viable for most, and is now proving to be wholly untenable. But solidarity economy models like community land trusts, cooperatives, and stewardship structures offer a real alternative. They allow people to stay in their communities, build intergenerational wealth, and have a direct say in how their neighborhoods evolve.

The more we invest in these models, the more we will be able to expand what is politically and economically possible. At The Guild, we uplift the CST structure not just as a model that builds community wealth but as a means to create onramps for people to relate differently to land, ownership, and ultimately, each other. That is, as a community.