We Can Hear Mosholu: (2+n) Angles on Transformative Land Strategies
Our collective knowledge of urban processes and political-economic relations benefits from triangulating different types of data and different perspectives. In this spirit, Nick Shatan of the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative reflects from two different angles on one type of political-economic relation: the Community Land Trust or, more generally, Community Land Organization.
Bronx Community Land Trust Annual Meeting, 2032
Good evening and welcome! What a gorgeous February day out there, t-shirt type of weather. How is everyone feeling this evening? I am utterly excited to be here tonight, to dream, deliberate, and commit to take action together.
Welcome to the annual meeting of the Bronx Community Land Trust, the twelfth since our founding in 2020. I’m Nicky, he/him, I live in the Amalgamated Coops, next to Ella Baker Park, and I used to be on the CLT board.
We begin as always, by acknowledging that our beloved borough is the unceded lands of the Munsee Lenape and the Wappinger, their past, present and future generations. It’s an honor to be in the presence tonight of members of these nations, with whom we’ve been working to restore sovereignty and land use rights to the Indigenous people on whose land we live. I look forward to hearing them speak in just a few moments.
Our CLT has roots in fighting gentrification, ensuring Bronxites of color could own their own labor, housing, and money to build shared wealth, and centering the most directly impacted people in decision-making and planning. Truthfully, at the beginning, we didn’t know how to square our pursuit of collective land ownership for people of color with the fact of land theft. But it became clear not too long after we started, in the process of healing after so much loss in our Bronx community and in Indigenous communities during COVID-19, when we actually met with members of these nations, that our struggles were aligned with those of Lenape land rematriation: working towards Black and Indigenous liberation, generative respect for Earth, dismantling white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy and capitalism. This is the Bronx I want to live in, this is the world I want to live in.
Listen! We can hear Mosholu, because our roots can hear Mosholu.
I’m my family’s fourth generation to live in Lenapehoking. My great-grandparents were Jews fleeing Minsk, Borisov, Zbarazh, Łomża, Włocławek, Kutno. They came to what we now call the Lower East Side, Flushing, the South Bronx, Norwood.
Today marks 100 years since my grandparents’ generation was born.
Today I’m as old as my grandfather was when he had his first heart attack. 39.
Today I’m as committed to being rooted in this place as they were in leaving it and never coming back.
They did that in 1955, took advantage of their whiteness to live in the suburbs. In the 70s, my mom moved to the city, my dad came down from the Upper West Side, and I grew up in downtown Manhattan.
I came back to the Bronx, down the hill from the last Jewish enclave, 15-minutes walk from where you can still get latkes, kasha varnishkes, and, on days when meat is available, pastrami. But at the time, when I listened to Black and Brown Bronxites talk about Jews here, it was usually about their bad landlords. It wasn’t anti-Semitism, it was the truth - most of the shmuck slumlords were Jewish, and we Jews in the Bronx knew it, the data supported the claim. It was clear: we had to get rid of the slumlords.
Now I can’t remember the last time I heard the word rent, honestly, can you? Led by the thinking of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and others, we got rid of jails and prisons, we got rid of fences, zoning, golf courses, the expressways and mold that were giving Bronxites asthma, we got rid of premature death through COVID, police, or otherwise. We were given the opportunity, as Sonya Renee Taylor said, “to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.” We enshrine what Emma Goldman called “the right of all people to beautiful and radiant things.”
Listen! We can hear Mosholu, because our roots can hear Mosholu.
Mosholu. That was one of those moments that started for me with reading and listening. 2020, time of uprisings. I read that my street, where I’d been living for three years, was built on top of a wetland, a brook. The Lenape call it Mosholu, a word I’d heard before as a street name. In the 1920s, City engineers put Mosholu under the asphalt and pavement. But my Bronx roots were deep enough for me to hear it, if I listened. The water called to me. I followed it.
Next to Mosholu, in what was then Van Cortlandt Park, there was an extensive Lenape village called Keskeskick. On this stolen land, the Van Cortlandt family owned slaves. In 2020, nooses were hung from trees in the park. Local Black organizers were already staging teach-ins about the nooses, and the history of slavery in our part of the Bronx. We listened and followed their lead. We stepped back when it wasn’t our place, and stepped up when called. We strategized and fought together. We made art, we danced bachata, we sewed masks together. We still love, feed, dream, laugh, think, plan, and pull shit off with each other. In 2025, we pushed for a tax on the wealthy, white homeowners next to the park, to charge them equal to their property value every year. The tax was a non-reformist reform, one of many going on across Turtle Island: the whole edifice of property extraction began to crumble in favor of sharing resources sustainably. The streets covering Mosholu were destroyed, and now the entire length of Mosholu runs free in the daylight as a resource for all.
Alright, I ought to stop talking now so you can listen to others. Thank you for your time and your attention.
30 Years of the Bronx Community Land Organization: Where to Next?
It’s January 11, 2050. Tonight is the Annual Membership Meeting of a nearby community land organization (CLO). Thirty years ago, following the suffering of COVID-19 and the subsequent global political and economic upheaval, this community demonstrated its resilience and capacity for mutual aid. In solidarity with diverse communities at the regional, national, and international scales, the community increased its ownership and governance of its resources outside of the system of private property. Not just through the CLO: through pushing systemic change that put people and planet over profit, through building structures where marginalized people own their money, labor, and housing.
The community has changed, but the people most impacted by the pandemic defined the course of this change: by developing and preserving buildings and spaces; by creating comprehensive neighborhood and regional plans that a community land coalition maintained; by deliberating and taking action together through packed neighborhood assemblies, centering and loving Black and Brown lives and voices; by demanding an end to homelessness because housing is a human right; by asserting that public resources requires social accountability. Those who might have otherwise been subject to targeting for predatory and high-interest lending on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and class, have built wealth sustainably through investing in shares in a local community investment fund and their limited equity housing cooperative. As a result, parts of the CLO’s network have weathered economic downturns better than the shrinking speculative market. People feel their quality of life, their health, and the future for their blood and chosen families have improved because they took part in the difficult work of showing up, making decisions, and being empowered through practices of economic democracy to make change in the places where they feel a sense of belonging.
The Annual Meeting starts with a celebration of the opening of the CLO’s latest project, designed for and with community members: a 100-unit cooperative built with a social housing fund, with intergenerational assembly space, a rooftop farm, a multi-stakeholder food coop, and collective space for artists and makers. The next item is a report on finances showing the health of the CLO’s mutual reserves fund that has prevented 30 residential foreclosures as well as the closures of 15 small businesses, three community gardens, a school, a hospital, and a library in the last five years. Then, an update on how the 10-year plan passed in 2040 had nearly reached its goals of neutralizing its carbon and waste footprints. Next, a discussion about the CLO’s main source of revenue, ground lease fees. Had they become too high for small business leaseholders, and if so, who or what should subsidize a decrease? Finally, the election of a new board begins with each nominee answering the question, what should happen here next?
Nick Shatan is Learning Manager at MIT CoLab’s Just Urban Economies program and Treasurer of the Bronx Community Land Trust. These reflections were first published as part of a Speculative Fiction live session hosted in July 2020. You can find the full recording here.