Saki Bailey is the new Executive Director of the San Francisco Community Land Trust

The SFCLT has made Saki Bailey the organization’s new Executive Director. Ms. Bailey is an advocate, administrator, and researcher who comes to SFCLT with extensive experience in affordable housing research, policy advocacy, and non-profit management. Saki has nine years of experience in nonprofit program development roles and more than a decade of experience in facilitation, teaching and training roles both in the academic and non-profit sectors.

Saki has a deep understanding and knowledge of the research, practice, policies and regulation of community land trusts, housing cooperatives, and other shared equity ownership models. Prior to coming to SFCLT, Saki served with the Bay Area Community Land Trust (as staff, board member, and consultant, as well as President of the board) and through BACLT advocated for policies that support community land trusts and limited equity housing cooperatives to thrive. She was a founding member of the working group on the Berkeley Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act and served as Chair of the California Community Land Trust Network’s Subcommittee on LEHCs, responsible for incubating the Housing Justice Tax Equity Act (AB 1206). As a board member of the California Community Land Trust Network, she serves as co-lead on supervising the design of a statewide survey of Community Land Trusts, the first of its kind, together with researchers at UC Berkeley’s Urban Displacement Project.

“Community Land Trusts offer a critical tool to preventing displacement and solving the housing crisis through housing preservation by creating affordability where and when people need it the most, not tomorrow or ten years from now, as with housing production, but by giving people the option to remain in the homes they know and love right now. SFCLT is going to play a critical role in the difficult years ahead in the fight for San Francisco’s soul as a place that people of diverse racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds can continue to call home.” —Saki Bailey

SFCLT Board President Keith Hennessy said, “We could not be happier than to welcome Saki Bailey as the new Executive Director of the San Francisco Community Land Trust. This is an exciting historical moment for community land trusts, community owned housing, and cooperative living to which Saki’s rich experience with community land trusts and her deep research in the commons will be an enormous benefit.”

SFCLT is a membership-based, nonprofit organization whose mission is to create permanently affordable, resident-controlled housing in San Francisco through community ownership of land. Our volunteer Board of Directors and members guide our work. Motivated by the ethics of anti- displacement and community-owned land, SFCLT is the only Community Land Trust organization in San Francisco. It currently owns 12 buildings including Columbus United Cooperative (the most recent LEHC formed in the state of CA to date); a 21-unit limited-equity building at the edge of Chinatown and North Beach; MGR House, a congregate living home in the Mission; and a range of multi-unit buildings which preserve permanently affordable housing for low-income tenants across the city.

In collaboration with FCDC (Filipino Community Development Corp), SFCLT is currently raising funds to acquire a 40-unit building in the Tenderloin where elderly, poor and low-income residents of color are in danger of displacement. This and other affordable housing preservation projects figure in the organization’s plans for the future.