David Kemper

David and his team have championed a transformative new tool called the Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust (MINT) that uses a Perpetual Purpose Trust as a legal structure to permanently preserve affordable housing and build community power in a growing number of cities across the United States.

At a moment when affordable housing has reached epidemic levels across nearly every corner of the country, David Kemper and Trust Neighborhoods have worked with neighborhood partners to create a new model for affordable housing where purposes, not people, own homes and apartments in perpetuity. It’s a powerful way to push back on gentrification, displacement, and evictions that affect lower-income residents in particular, and give neighborhoods the ability to articulate and enforce values that shape their housing policy.

At the core of Trust Neighborhoods’ work is the Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust – or MINT – that uses a Perpetual Purpose Trust structure that has gained popularity in recent years as a way to expand fiduciary responsibility beyond profit-maximization. One of the most prominent recent examples of such a legal structure is Patagonia, whose founder transferred the company’s entire voting stock to a Perpetual Purpose Trust, which gives it power to make key decisions and safeguard the $3 billion company’s values and mission indefinitely. Until now, however, this model has had limited application for controlling real estate assets. David and his team have seized on this opportunity within the law to establish a new best practice with implications for the affordable housing field writ large, and a nonprofit team, Trust Neighborhoods, that works with neighborhood partners to create MINTs, support the growing community of MINTs, and bring the model to scale.

A MINT works by purchasing or developing a portfolio of real estate focused in a particular neighborhood that is facing likely rising costs of housing. MINTs so far have often renovated old properties with some construction of new ones. A majority of housing units within the portfolio are permanently capped at affordable rates, akin to preservation programs for Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing. This is put under the same trust ownership as other housing at unrestricted market rates. This provides a built-in subsidize for the overall the portfolio, ensuring long-term sustainability, and allowing each MINT to attract a greater variety and volume of capital.

For governance, within a MINT, a Perpetual Purpose Trust controls 100 percent of the voting rights of a real estate-holding LLC. This means properties are kept out of the speculative real estate market and can never be purchased as investments and ‘flipped’ into higher-market buildings. There is also a built-in profit-sharing mechanism between investors and a reserve for the trust itself to use according to its stated purpose, a “purpose reserve.” Among its many benefits is the fact that MINTs can fund affordability and neighborhood improvement simultaneously via the same legal and funding structure, whereas these goals to date are typically disconnected if not in direct conflict.

Trust Neighborhoods always backs an existing neighborhood based organization, and sees itself as in service to their work. This means partnering with existing citizen sector organization, for example a Community Quarterback in the Purpose Built Communities Network in Tulsa, or a Community Development Corporation and tenants union in Boston. Trust Neighborhoods supports this neighborhood partner in to establishing and stewarding a trust that acquires, renovates, or builds rental housing in rapidly gentrifying areas. While most such communities have neighborhood institutions, they rarely have the extra time and capacity and expertise to secure and develop properties before they get scooped up by private developers. Trust Neighborhoods provides support during the set-up process from underwriting to legal structuring, partners on capital raising, and brings the organizational expertise they gain from running MINTs across multiple jurisdictions. Local organizations bring trust and existing relationships across the community and have full control and governance of the MINT at the local level – making sure that key decisions like rent increases and new property acquisition remain in the hands of community members.

MINTs are operating in five U.S. cities to date – from Kansas City to East Boston to Fresno – and have deployed $70 million in capital. They have a pipeline of over a dozen additional cities and dozens of neighborhoods, with continuing inbound interest from new partners, and have built their team specifically to work with these existing and new partners on bringing MINTs to a meaningful scale. The purpose trust model is built for scale, but with guardrails to ensure communities maintain control of valuable assets and capture that value as it increases. David and team estimate that 100 MINTS in the US would save 50,000 renters $300 million over a decade, not to mention prevent countless displacements of residents and small businesses across the country.

Affordable housing is a crisis in the United States. Home prices are up 60 percent on average over the last decade. And it's estimated that there are 3.8 million fewer homes in the country than is needed. For renters, the situation is no better: rents are up across the board, with half of all renters paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent. This has fueled an eviction epidemic among lower-income communities in particular, with 3.5 million Americans facing the prospect of eviction during the Covid-19 pandemic. For such communities, there's an additional problem: they are either stuck in areas of disinvestment and disrepair, or rapid gentrification ultimately pushes them out of their homes and neighborhoods to make way for wealthier residents as home prices and rents increase.

Thus represents the Catch-22 of community improvement which Trust Neighborhoods sees as a broken social contract at the neighborhood level: In many cases, making your neighborhood a better place to live not only does not make your life better, it makes your life worse. Time and again, collective efforts to raise quality of life or push for better public resources lead to displacement, barring legacy residents from the improved health, safety, education, and economic opportunities that neighbors on the rise can deliver. In just one example, residents of East Boston spoke of organizing for years to get better public transit access only to see themselves priced out of their own homes as they were now marketed as having excellent transit access. According to a 2021 study, lower-income renters are significantly more likely to exit from gentrifying neighborhoods. Moreover, they tend to move to neighborhoods with lower school quality and higher crime rates and have a higher probability of changing jobs and making less money.

There’s an urgent need for newer, more powerful tools in the affordable housing toolbox. For neighborhoods facing gentrification, many of the tools available were primarily designed for when neighborhoods were declining in value and in the highest need of investment because they aren’t able to capitalize on future value, they must be fully funded by philanthropic and public dollars. This is inherently limiting, and often far too slow to match the speed and scale of both neighborhood change and commercial real estate transactions. Most current interventions are almost exclusively focused on new housing projects, as opposed to buying existing stock and shifting them into a trust, which MINTs can do. And even new affordable housing developments, without the legal requirements of a trust, can in time be flipped into more luxury units. Better tools are even more necessary in the face of more coordinated threats to affordable housing that have emerged over the last decade: from private equity investing in hundreds of thousands of single-family homes as new tradable commodities, to AI tools now under federal investigation that artificially inflate rental prices across the U.S. At the root is a fundamental power imbalance where those focused on affordable housing are constantly on the defensive – outmatched by the speed and private capital that dominates the world of real estate development.

David’s goal is to refine and grow the Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust until it becomes a widely used best practice in affordable housing that can shift the balance of power toward community control over housing policy and development. The team’s strategy is very much a field-building strategy: design something new and better, prove that it works, and build demand for it via key allies and partners. Already the team has piloted the model in five U.S. cities and is aggressively recruiting capital to double that within the next two years.

Trust Neighborhoods designed Mixed-Income Neighborhood Trust (MINT) to stop the negative cycle of investment leading to displacement. Hundreds of neighborhoods will gentrify over the next decade, and MINTs can ensure that today’s residents can stay and benefit. Here’s how the MINT works: It develops, owns and operates mixed-income rental properties throughout a given neighborhood, for example Kansas City. Over time, unrestricted rents pay for keeping today’s affordable rents in perpetuity, preempting displacement by preserving affordability. MINTs are integrated across neighborhoods and properties, rather than consolidated in one area. Critically, each MINT manages a financially sustainable real estate portfolio, drawing on equity and debt to tap into larger sources of patient impact capital that accept lower ROI in exchange for greater shared value. The Perpetual Purpose Trust has full controlling interest, with a holding company underneath that must serve the trust’s longer-term purpose – i.e. with a fiduciary responsibility to state values such as belonging, diversity, anti-displacement. Together they guarantee alignment of the MINT with both community needs and investor expectations. As David says: when you own something, you can make fundamentally different choices. The MINT, because it’s rooted in the Purpose Trust, can do something unusual: gain outside capital without giving up control.

A MINT serves multiple unmet needs of neighborhood organizations. First, the challenge of accessing capital at the scale needed to make a dent in the affordable housing crisis. MINTs use a flexible capital stack that allows them to draw bigger dollars from equity investors, debt and subsidy programs, going beyond the limits of today’s housing toolkit. Second, on the challenge of competing with the speed of the private market, upfront funding means neighborhoods can quickly acquire properties on the market as a cash buyer (as a comparison, it takes on average four years to apply for tax credits for affordable housing.) Third, on the lack of good, accountable owners to replace predatory landlords, MINTs actually acquire existing properties and build new housing and manage those properties in a values-driven way. Finally, many affordable housing programs aren’t designed to meet the flexibility within a specific neighborhood’s typology. MINTs can both acquire existing or build new housing, and work in a range of typologies from single-family homes to larger multi-family properties.

Rather than trying to fund affordability separate from neighborhood improvement, Trust Neighborhoods tie the two together in the same legal and funding structure with each MINT. This has allowed MINTs to, for example, both acquire an apartment building on a block, and renovate two vacant houses across the street from it. The improved value from the now safer and desirable block is captured in some of the units, while others are preserved, so that residents who lived through years of gunshots from the vacant houses at 3am now get to live there when there are no longer gunshots. This is a microcosm of creating an economic system at a neighborhood scale where value creation pays for impact which creates more value in turn creating more impact. It also means that MINTs represent a valuable, stable asset that complements other markers of healthy neighborhoods on the rise: new homeowners, community land trusts, small businesses, and more.
The fact that the MINT was designed with these pain points in mind is a testament to how effectively Trust Neighborhoods works in partnership with local organizations. The model itself was a product of dozens of deep need finding interviews with residents and community groups in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. And shared control and governance with anchor community groups remains a non-negotiable piece of the puzzle. For any given city, Trust Neighborhoods represents an immediate capacity and support team with both values alignment and expertise to set up a Perpetual Purpose Trust that is ultimately managed by that neighborhood partner, with stakeholders in governance with real power.
What does that look like? Take the example of East Boston. Established in 2022, The East Boston Neighborhood Trust was a joint project between Trust Neighborhoods, the East Boston Community Development Corporation, and City Life / Vida Urbana, with a dozen additional local partners participating. A largely immigrant and refugee neighborhood, the new trust focused on family-sized units, ultimately acquiring 114 units across 36 buildings – via $8M in private funding and a $12M city loan, among other sources of funding.

In Boston as in elsewhere, the MINT has a governance structure that shifts power dynamics by centering residents in the process of authoring the trust’s legal purpose and giving them seats on the MINT stewardship committees. David and his team talk about the explicit goal of “changing who changes our cities” – and so involves a wide range of interest groups from Day 1, including individual renters and tenant unions. This enables the Trust Stewardship Committee and Operating Board to govern with deep knowledge of the experience of being a renting resident of the neighborhood, as well as build on relationships and trust developed over years and often decades by these stakeholders. The stewardship committees are complemented by an operating board – which prioritizes those with extensive real estate expertise – and a General Manager who oversees day-to-day operations, property acquisition and management, and more for the holding company. Trust Neighborhoods is now working on formalizing its peer learning network across its neighborhoods so that as local partners gain expertise on how to run and refine a MINT, they can be a resource for one another.

Scaling the idea requires a combination of timing, trust, building demand, and of course capital. The Trust Neighborhood team prioritizes several factors in choosing cities for expansion, including: the presence of neighborhood associations eager to partner, growth happening, the feasible acquisition of properties, anti-displacement as a high priority locally, and possible capital partners. Often, they look at peer neighborhoods, or upcoming investments that are likely to precipitate gentrification (as David says, you have to move with speed and find your footing two years before the hip coffee shop opens). It may be a park investment, as in Atlanta with the Beltline’s creation and expansion, or in Los Angeles where the improvement along the LA river and surrounding parks has neighborhoods vocal about the displacement risk. The growth of new “meds and eds” – i.e. schools, universities, healthcare centers – are also markers of upcoming gentrification. Trust Neighborhoods is even finding themselves now approached by some of these institutions that are catalyzing change, knowing there is displacement risk, to look into proactively working on anti-displacement.

In addition to its initial five pilots, Trust Neighborhoods is in the early stages of launching MINTs in Detroit and St. Louis, with eight other cities in the pipeline. They’re working to build support from the public sector to advocate for this work and push for greater community control over housing – and are encouraged by both public funding from the City of Fresno and Boston, as well as Mayor Michelle Wu celebrating on more than one occasion what is happening with the East Boston Neighborhood Trust. Meanwhile, Trust Neighborhoods is engaging major and institutional capital providers and targeting family offices who might invest in MINTs. There is sufficient capital out there to do considerably more than is being done now, and a growing team will help the organization source it with more speed.

The goal is that the MINT becomes a standard tool that is understood and trusted both by communities and by capital. A conservative estimate would be to have 10 more trusts up and running in the next three years, representing a minimum of 1,000 units of housing. After more modest pilots, David and team will prioritize larger projects (a minimum of 100 units) which allows the work to be more self-sustaining from Day 1. To facilitate their spread, Trust Neighborhoods is exploring partnerships with existing networks of relevant neighborhood-based partners. For example, a current MINT partner, Growing Together, is part of Purpose Built Communities, a national network of community and neighborhood groups that invest in education and housing, which wrote a case study on the model and asked Trust Neighborhoods to run a workshop at its recent conference. On the capital front, they are targeting place-based capital via family offices and foundations with the ability to make significant investments at the city or national level.

Trust Neighborhoods had an annual operating budget of $1.4M in 2024, up from $1.1M in 2023. 40 percent of its most recent budget was earned revenue, with 60 percent grants. The target is 75% earned revenue by 2028 alongside ongoing operating grant support and grants for strategic investments.

David grew up in Kansas City, MO, 1.5 miles west of Troost, the dividing line in a deeply segregated city. Early in life, he remembers watching beautiful old buildings disappear in clouds of dust from the roof of his dad’s office building. In the 90s it was a city destroying itself. At church, a candle was lit for every life lost to gun violence. Haunted by the growing number of flames, David began researching the relationship between urbanism and violence for his capstone project in high school. He originally went to college to study architecture, but found the practice was too formal and focused on aesthetics, and often deliberately avoiding the very questions around power, people, and economics that interested him.
David ended up in an Urban Fellows program in NYC and then in city government, working at the neighborhood level in Housing Preservation and Development. It gave him a close view of how cities change in real time, who was affected by those changes and how. He also saw the effects of gentrification in his small building in Chinatown – where despite organizing efforts and rent protections, families would get pushed out by investors to make way for young professionals like him.

It was in NYC where David started testing his entrepreneurial mettle, building a new team within the Division of Capital Planning with the goal of pooling talent and resources across the city’s tens of billions of dollars in capital expenditures to better serve neighborhood priorities. They had many successes, including funding and establishing a billion-dollar neighborhood development fund that incentivized siloed agency budgets to find both economic efficiencies and better ways to deliver on community planning processes that too often were neglected. But it revealed both the limitations that neighborhoods faced to shape their own futures, and the limitations of operating within a vast institution. From there, David was part of a small founding team of Sidewalk Labs, a moonshot project out of Google focused on improving urban infrastructure via technological solutions. It was a dramatic pivot that helped David learn the mechanics of entrepreneurship, the excitement of incubating new companies and raising large amounts of capital.

David made his way to Oxford for graduate school -- in large part to work with economist Paul Collier, whose “bottom billion” theory explored why impoverished countries fail to progress despite international aid and support. David was able to conduct research with Collier’s team in International Growth Center sites in Africa and South Asia, from Lagos to Delhi to Addis Abbaba. In the wake of 2016, one big takeaway was that the work needed to be done at home. David moved back to Kansas City in 2019, to the neighborhood where one of the first two MINTs launched in 2021.