East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, Oakland

<p>In 2017, residents of an Oakland apartment complex learned their landlord had put their building on the open market. Facing displacement in one of America's most expensive housing markets, they approached a new organization: the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative. EB PREC, founded that same year and incubated out of a partnership between the People of Color Sustainable Housing Network and the Sustainable Economies Law Center, had a radical proposition — what if housing could be permanently removed from the speculative market? The building purchase closed in 2018 as a partnership between EB PREC and the Northern California Land Trust. The residents — a group of queer, indigenous, and people of color who organized together — became co-stewards of their own home. That project, known as Coop 789, was the first of several.</p><p>EB PREC is a Black women-led cooperative organizing its community to finance, acquire, and co-steward land and make it permanently affordable. The model is called a Permanent Real Estate Cooperative — a hybrid that combines features of community land trusts, limited equity housing cooperatives, and real estate investment cooperatives. Unlike traditional land trusts (which are nonprofits), the cooperative structure allows EB PREC to take capital in multiple forms and isn't restricted to serving only low-income residents. The idea is that everyone — high- and low-income alike — should stop profiting from property and live in price-stabilized housing.</p><p>Director Noni Session puts it simply: "Our protection of properties lasts into perpetuity, not 99 years like a typical land trust. Communities need permanence to be able to build their vision." To date, EB PREC has raised $5 million through a direct public offering, with shares at $1,000 and target dividends of 1.5 percent. They've liberated several properties and grown to nearly 600 members. One property, donated by its owner, now houses three Black women artists and educators. Another, Esther's Orbit Room, is being transformed into affordable housing for artists above and a launchpad for Black-led cooperative businesses below. The relational technology here is the cooperative structure itself — a legal and financial form that turns housing from a commodity into a covenant, and neighbors from tenants into co-stewards.</p>