A man on a MISSION

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" rowspan="2" width=200 BGCOLOR="#99CC99" TEXT="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="1278dfc3.jpg"> <div> <A HREF="id61.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="New Directions in Civic Renewal"><U><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c866330000.gif" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">New Directions in Civic Renewal</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id48.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="How do you know its grassroots?"><U><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c866330000.gif" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">How do you know it's grassroots?</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id59.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="New Directions History"><U><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c866330000.gif" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">New Directions History</U></A></div> <div> <B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c866330000.gif" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">A man on a MISSION</B></div> <div> <A HREF="id81.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Summer Research Fellowship"><U><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c866330000.gif" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">Summer Research Fellowship</U></A></div> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=82 BGCOLOR="#CCCC99" TEXT="#080000" bgproperties="fixed" background="1288dfe1esnpes.jpg"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#336666" FACE="Arial" ><B>New Directions CBRI</B></FONT><B>     </B><B>|</B><B>     </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="New Directions CBRI"><U><B>home</B></U></A></div> <div> back to  <A HREF="id41.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Documents"><U><B>Documents</B></U></A></div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" height=398 colspan=2 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <B>A man on a MISSION</B></div> <div> <B>A lifetime of experience has convinced Bob Mulvey that land trusts are the route to affordable housing</B></div> <div> BY BOB KEELER</div> <div> Newsday Staff Writer</div> <div> <FONT SIZE="4" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" >LI Life </FONT>section, January 21, 2007  (For page image and photos, see  <A HREF="http://www.newdirectionscbr.org/bookstore/Man_on_Mission.pdf" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.newdirectionscbr.org/bookstor"><U>pdf version.</U></A>)</div> <bR> <div> The seed of Bob Mulvey's passion for communities first took root in the unlikely soil of Grumman, the company that built the spindly lunar lander and the muscular "Top Gun" F-14 fighter jet that Tom Cruise made famous.</div> <div> Decades later, in the even unlikelier soil of Long Island, where owning a single-family home is nearly a sacrament, he is the Johnny Appleseed, the persistent prophet, of a different and misunderstood housing option: the community land trust. This form of ownership can be either a transition to help people get from rental to the more traditional ownership market. Or it can grow into a permanent third way. </div> <div> On the Island, land trusts have been unfolding - in places such as Fishers Island, Southold, Bellport and Farmingdale - but they have not yet become a major factor. Now, with the powerful Ford Foundation throwing its considerable weight into the effort, land trusts are getting a boost. Still, to many ears, the term sounds too countercultural, too Sixties.</div> <div> Despite that image, its proponents argue, it makes sense. The costliest component of housing is land, and land trusts hold down that cost. They are not-for-profit, democratically run organizations that own land, oversee the purchase and sale of the houses that sit on it, and maintain the affordability of the houses. They control how much profit owners can make when they sell land-trust homes. That lets owners take away enough equity to buy their next home on the open market, but it keeps some of the increased value with the land, to make land-trust homes affordable for future buyers.</div> <div> <B>Coast-to-coast movement</B></div> <div> In a nation that preaches democracy and homeownership, what could be more appealing than a concept that combines the two? It is picking up momentum from coast to coast. One major organization in the field, the Institute for Community Economics, based in Springfield, Mass., reports that the movement has grown from a tiny handful of land trusts in the late 1960s to more than 100 nationwide.</div> <div> In California, the City of Irvine has set up a large land trust, aiming at 10,000 units, said George McCarthy, the Ford Foundation program officer who has begun dealing with Mulvey. In addition, he said, Chicago is aiming at a 15,000- unit land trust, and there are "early-stage discussions" about creating the largest land trust in the nation in the City of New York. Recently, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has set a goal of providing and preserving affordable housing for 500,000 New Yorkers by 2013.</div> <div> Yet, on Long Island, it remains a tough sell.</div> <div> Its chief local salesman is the squarely built, silver-haired Mulvey. As he spreads the slow-growing seeds of community land trusts in the inhospitable soil of the Island, he speaks in a sometimes foggy amalgam of vocabularies drawn from everything he's ever been and everything he's ever read. Mulvey is a voracious reader, a cradle Catholic who has guided much of his recent life by a single idea from a sacred text of Buddhism. "In the Dhammapada, it says your work is to find your work, and then with all your heart, to give yourself to it," Mulvey said.</div> <div> The journey to that work began when Mulvey came to Long Island in 1960 as a systems engineer, first for Sperry, then for Grumman. In that decade, Grumman built the lunar excursion module. During those years, Mulvey's skills expanded with an MBA and a law degree. He reveled in the exuberant array of talents that Grumman had assembled in pursuit of military contracts and the glory of a moon landing.</div> <div> "That was a very formative experience to me in that aerospace world in the Sixties," Mulvey recalled.</div> <div> <B>Expanding experiences</B></div> <div> In that era, a robust Grumman began looking for ways to diversify beyond aerospace. One strong company skill was facilities development and management: running its vast array of buildings. As a corporate planner, Mulvey researched planned communities to see whether Grumman's experienced facilities employees could lead the company into civilian real estate development.</div> <div> Then, in 1969, the same year a Grumman lunar lander put American astronauts on the moon, the firm landed a contract to build fighters for the Navy. It was heady news for Grumman, but it was not without peril. The contract required the company to build the planes at a fixed price. As inflation and costs soared, Grumman's ability to make F-14s profitably began to decline. Gradually, that decline squeezed the company's ability to diversify.</div> <div> Early in the 1970s, as Grumman cut back on the kind of work he had been doing, Mulvey took his growing real estate and planning skills to Chase Manhattan Bank, where he became vice president for corporate planning. But he quickly wearied of the internal politics there. "They were a different culture than me," he recalled.</div> <div> Then a friend of his, the corporation counsel for Yonkers, invited him to interview for a job. So Mulvey got into government as the city's superintendent of buildings, and there he first experienced a task that has become his passion.</div> <div> Landlords were not maintaining buildings. When Mulvey tried to crack down, the landlords would hire attorneys and stall. "We gave them the alternative to come and negotiate," Mulvey said. "They didn't believe the tenants would participate. The tenants didn't think the landlords would. But they both showed up."</div> <div> That experience, bringing divergent parts of a community together to better the whole, captured Mulvey's imagination, and it stuck with him. He rose to acting city manager, but with an election and a change of administrations, he had to move on. For the next 15 years, he taught business law, corporate finance and planning, and government administration at C.W. Post.</div> <div> <B>Assembling a team</B></div> <div> While teaching, still lured by the powerful idea of community betterment, he spent about a year working with a consulting firm that was doing community development for the Town of Babylon. In that work, he met two people who would become part of his evolving vision: Sibyl Mizzi, who was the town's housing director, trying to put people into affordable homes, and Andrew Collver, a Stony Brook University sociologist. Together, they learned a core truth about communities: Washington grants are a limited blessing.</div> <div> "They turn out to be big money being spent by big businesses," Collver said. "The street doesn't flood anymore, but the people are still the same as they were. We wanted to see something that would develop the people." Only the people themselves could do that. "We needed a way to get the community itself to take charge of itself and do what they see needs doing."</div> <div> Ultimately, that insight, plus his work in Yonkers, led Mulvey to establish New Directions Community Services, which became New Directions Community-Based Research Institute. Its goal was to help communities envision better futures for themselves. But that wasn't easy to explain. When New Directions tried to work with a community, people expected Mulvey and Collver to direct them, but the institute was simply trying to help the community discern its problems and potential solutions.</div> <div> "We're not talking about delivering a service, as such, although we are," Collver said. "When we work with people in the neighborhood, they get the impression we're not doing anything. That's the secret of a good facilitator."</div> <div> To guide the institute, Mulvey created a board drawn from the pillars of the financial and not-for-profit worlds - people accustomed to delivering specific services, including Mizzi, his contact from the Babylon experience. The chairwoman is Michelle DiBenedetto of Citibank, which has kept the institute going. Collver is the research director. It operates on a tiny budget out of donated space in a Malverne law firm, Kruman & Kruman. And over the years, its directors have kept pushing Mulvey to articulate more clearly what he was selling.</div> <div> "It's not easy," said one board member, David Sprintzen, an emeritus philosophy professor at C.W. Post and a founder of the Long Island Progressive Coalition. Sprintzen said the board asks Mulvey, in effect: "What is it, Bob, that you're trying to say? What are the outcomes going to be?"</div> <div> Still, if his articulation is too opaque, his vision is clear - a desire to help communities explore their own needs and then use land trusts as a way to solve the housing shortage - and the board sees that. "As long as Bob is willing to do this," Sprintzen said, "I'm willing to work with him on it."</div> <div> Since 1993, New Directions has led a variety of training sessions and community studies - most notably, a hamlet study in the South Country School District in Bellport. Along the way, Mulvey discovered land trusts, and that has become the institute's deliverable service, its big idea.</div> <div> He read a book, "Small Is Beautiful," by E.F. Schumacher. He connected with two Massachusetts-based organizations influential in the land-trust movement, the E.F. Schumacher Society, whose founder, the late Robert Swann, was a pioneer of land trusts in the 1960s, and the Institute for Community Economics. He reached out to Burlington Associates in Community Development, a consulting group with roots in the successful community land trust in the City of Burlington, Vt.</div> <div> <B>Subsidies stay with housing</B></div> <div> Burlington Associates preaches that in traditional affordable housing arrangements, subsidies go to the buyers to reduce an otherwise unaffordable price. But the subsidies disappear when those buyers move on, and the subsidy providers - usually governments - have to subsidize the next buyers, too. Land trusts keep the subsidy with the land, maintaining its affordability by making it less of a commodity, less of a speculative investment. Burlington is considered a progressive town, but it was a conservative instinct - the desire not to see traditional subsidies go to waste - that helped the city go ahead with a land trust, to conserve subsidies.</div> <div> It's true that more traditional affordable housing organizations put deed restrictions on homes to maintain affordability, but that doesn't always work. "A community land trust using a ground lease is more permanent," said Mary O'Hara of Burlington Associates. "We've all seen situations where housing that was supposed to be maintained as permanently affordable, somehow or other, those deed restrictions get ignored in the resale." From Mizzi, who had helped people buy homes affordably in Babylon, Mulvey found that those same homes ultimately went onto the open market, where they are now anything but affordable.</div> <div> On Long Island, Mulvey heard of a land trust that was forming in Southold, and he helped start one in Bellport over the past three years. Farmingdale is on the way, through the Alliance for Stronger Communities, founded by Chuck Gosline, a Northrop Grumman engineer and civic activist. These newer land trusts have not acquired land or houses - either from government donations or through purchase - to start selling affordable homes. But the momentum is growing, both in conversations with officials and communities in Nassau County, and with the Ford Foundation.</div> <div> Just before Thanksgiving, at the Milleridge Carriage House, Mulvey led the third in a series of seminars on land trusts. What made this one different was the presence of McCarthy, a big, bearded, fast-talking program officer from the Ford Foundation, which has assets of more than $11.5 billion and made grants of $555 million in fiscal year 2005.</div> <div> <B>Challenge for the future</B></div> <div> Last summer in Colorado, at a national conference on community land trusts, McCarthy threw down a stunning challenge: Right now, the "shared equity" model for housing, a category dominated by land trusts, accounts for less than 1 percent of all housing. McCarthy urged land-trust advocates to set an amazingly ambitious goal of 25 percent in the first quarter of this century.</div> <div> Of course, Mulvey was at that conference in Boulder, and it led him to invite McCarthy to Long Island, where he was the centerpiece of the Nov. 20 event at Milleridge. In his energetic talk, McCarthy made it clear that the Ford Foundation wants land trusts to become more than a transitional way of finding a place to live, a bridge between rental and home ownership. He says land trusts should be an equally valid third option for housing. Coming from an organization with the clout of the Ford Foundation, uttered in the heart of single-family-home suburbia, those are ringing words.</div> <div> Later in the morning, one member of Mulvey's board took a moment during the coffee break to express a new optimism. "I sense a different mood here today than a year ago," said Richard Dina, senior adviser for university advancement at Adelphi University.</div> <div> The Ford Foundation lends the issue enhanced seriousness. So does the desperate need for workforce housing on the Island. If land-trust housing takes hold here, any history of that outcome would have to include Mulvey's persistence over many years, through a journey that began with Grumman and has come back to Northrop Grumman, one of many companies looking for ways to house their employees. Sent forth by a Buddhist text, Mulvey has spent years looking for his work, and he's found it.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>