Land trusts offer new approach to community redevelopment
The following post is the latest installment in a monthly series from Oakland-based ChangeLab Solutions in collaboration with Reporting On Health.
The Sterling neighborhood in Greenville, South Carolina, was once the social and economic heart of the city’s African American community. Sterling High School, a community hub surrounded by homes and flourishing businesses, was especially vital to the neighborhood. Its students were involved in America’s civil rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s. A fire destroyed the high school in 1967, leaving some residents so heartbroken they moved away, and many of Sterling’s best and brightest moved on to continue their education and careers elsewhere. Since then, the neighborhood has been plagued by poverty and high crime rates. Now, its residents are being displaced by the gentrification taking place in the city’s western neighborhoods.
Gentrification has been one of redevelopment’s legacies in many cities. This is especially true in places in which the existing low-income residents have little voice and in which there is little force guiding land development decisions besides the marketplace. Community land trusts are an effort to change that balance of economic power. A community land trust (CLT) is a nonprofit organization that develops and maintains affordable housing, community gardens, or other buildings and spaces that help a community’s residents thrive.
Inspired by the neighborhood’s vibrant history and frustrated by its decline, Sterling’s current residents, some of them alumni of the former high school, are actively working to return the neighborhood to its previous condition. With an overarching mission “centered around the principle that residents have the most power to change Sterling for the better,” a group of community members formed the Sterling Land Trust in 2010 to revitalize the neighborhood and enable community ownership, so residents aren’t priced out of their neighborhood as it improves. However, the path toward this goal has been challenging. The Trust has come up against many roadblocks, particularly as they’ve tried to access funds from lenders. Even though things have not gone as planned, the trust’s board hopes their experience will be a lesson to those who want to approach community redevelopment in innovative ways.
Urban farm grows healthy food
Sterling Land Trust, the first community land trust in South Carolina, focuses specifically on neighborhood sustainability, grassroots organizing, and developing commercial and residential real estate. So far, the trust has established the Sterling Pride Farm, an urban farm that provides free fruit and vegetables to community members who otherwise have a hard time accessing healthy food. In addition, the farm will generate income as its crops are sold to neighboring communities. The trust has also earmarked the Huddle Soda Shop, an abandoned restaurant that used to be a hang-out spot for Sterling High School’s students, as the future site of a community hub. The site would provide a meeting space, market, or café that further supports the neighborhood’s economic health.
A mill that turns profits for other projects
The trust’s most ambitious project is the revitalization of a three-acre site, previously home to the Plush Velvet Mill. The mill, which has fallen into disrepair, has been a blight on the area for years. The trust sees great potential in this site, which could contain businesses that, through their lease payments, would serve as an income stream for revitalizing other properties. Doing so would channel wealth into local pockets, rather than those of the developers or third parties who traditionally drive the redevelopment process. This makes the trust’s plan to purchase Plush Velvet Mill outright, through a combination of donations, loans, and new markets tax credits, highly unusual.
Many lenders have been hesitant to partner with the fledgling trust because it has no successful track record when it comes to property redevelopment. Through donations from board members and seed funds from the Bon Secours St. Francis Health System Foundation as well as the local hospital, the Sterling Land Trust was able to raise enough money to take out an option (purchasing the right to buy property for a specified price by a specified time) to purchase the mill, but they are still $450,500 short of the funds needed to complete the purchase. Additional money has been hard to come by and as a result, the trust’s board, despite its goal of full community ownership, has forged a partnership with a local developer in effort to keep the project moving. The board is hoping this partnership will still lead to Sterling’s vision of neighborhood-led, community-owned redevelopment.
The difficulties of developing from within
The Sterling Land Trust’s board wants to capture the wealth generation in the community and create a model that could serve as a template for others. However, community-led redevelopment efforts are tough to pull off, and CLTs typically start small before working their way up to bigger projects like this one.
However, Sterling’s goals are important because they represent a paradigm shift in what CLTs can do in South Carolina and surrounding areas as independent entities, as opposed to those whose fate rests in the hands of outsiders. Sterling’s story continues as they work to “protect, preserve and promote the historic legacies of the Sterling community,” and also make some concessions to realize their vision. The Sterling Land Trust hopes “to become a powerful example of community development at its best.”
Fledging CLTs can get a head start on their community-led redevelopment initiatives by taking advantage of the National Community Land Trust Network (NCLT), which offers a library of tools and resources that includes “Starting a Community Land Trust,” “Funding, Financing & Growth” and “Non-Residential Projects.” Under “Non-Residential Projects” are archived webinars hosted by experts in the field, written materials on topics such as transforming contaminated urban sites through community land trusts, and a series of one-page case studies on urban agriculture and commercial development.
The NCLT website calls the community land trust model “a powerful and flexible one,” but as Sterling’s example shows, it isn’t simple to implement. Although redevelopment of the mill property may not occur in the community-centered way that they originally envisioned, Sterling’s board is still learning from their experiences and pressing forward.
Photo by Delano United via Flickr.