Mixed Income Neighborhood Trusts, or MINTS, were a brand new concept three years ago, but Trust Neighborhoods has quickly grown from two buildings in one city to 170 residences in five cities.
MINTS are a rare economic justice innovation that found the right inflection point in the system at just the right point to halt the tide of displacement when renters were being swept away by the higher prices that came with gentrification.
With rent turning into equity, and sometimes a path to home ownership, Trust Neighborhoods have in that short time amassed $60 million in assets.
MINTS are an example of scaling – rapidly replicating because of finding the right inflection point in a system to literally shift the landscape.
But MINTS are just one example of an encouraging trend across the country; there are more and more innovations that help people who have not had assets to gain them, through models that are ready for replication.
In Buncombe County North Carolina, where Asheville, a popular tourist town, is located, redlining of Black neighborhoods has created a familiar pattern of houses in these neighborhoods being valued lower, while being taxed proportionately higher than nearby predominantly white neighborhoods.
But the Just Accounting Coalition, a new collaboration of interesting allies may have the combination to overturn decades of injustice, while at the same time bringing in more tax revenue to the county. The Just Accounting Coalition is made up of people who come at this work from a number of angles: a justice-focused, urban planning and analysis firm; a nationwide coalition of “new urbanists” formerly focused on walkable neighborhoods; the local racial justice coalition; a foundation created by the sale of a hospital; and the health department of a local university. (Learn more about the Just Accounting Coalition on this podcast: https://www.podavl.com/)
Under-taxing McMansions while overtaxing neighborhoods that have suffered from decades of structural racism actually costs a county or a city money, often millions every year. In the case of predominantly Black neighborhoods in Buncombe County, the parents and grandparents of many current home owners were denied low cost, government-guaranteed mortgages after the Depression and Black veterans returning from World War II were denied low cost, guaranteed GI home loans. Yet these homeowners were paying proportionately more taxes on their homes. The Just Accounting Coalition has pulled together the data to demonstrate not just how wrong this is, but also how costly this is to the county.
While rapacious capitalism continues to commodify people and exploit resources at the national level, at multiple local cities across the country a new economy is emerging, with solutions that subvert structural racist rules while delivering economic power to people who have been denied their fair share. The Just Accounting Coalition is a great example of such emerging solutions.
We will be doing more in depth coverage of scores of economic justice innovations with proven models that are ready to be replicate through this newsletter each week during the run-up to the conference
We will be gathering the practitioners with these new solutions that are repairing local economies to San Antonio in February, along with catalytic foundations, faith-based funders, and people who care about their local economies. We help make the matches of entrepreneurs and funders that will enable more and faster replication of the tools that are repairing local economies.
Come be part of the new economy that’s replacing rugged individualism with wholesome interdependence that enables everyone, in every zip code and neighborhood, to thrive.