San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Land trust and demo fund would be a first
Anovel approach to preserving affordable housing for low-income families is percolating on the West Side.
The Esperanza Peace & Justice Center is set to receive $300,000 from the San Antonio Housing Trust Fund and Foundation to set up an emergency demolition fund and a community land trust, which would be the first of its kind in San Antonio.
The fund would be used to save and rehabilitate older houses, which would be required to join the land trust. The trust would rent or resell the houses to families earning up to 30 percent of the area median income.
Esperanza is matching the Housing Trust’s award by contributing three casitas it recently acquired near its Rinconcito de Esperanza programming hub at South Colorado and Guadalupe streets as well as its own cash.
The nonprofit will set up a board composed of members of Esperanza and other West Side organizations and residents, said Pete Alanis, the Housing Trust’s executive director.
Houses on the West Side are frequent targets for demolition, and homeowners’ funds and city resources for repairs are limited, said Graciela Sanchez, director of the Esperanza center.
“The idea is to preserve the building but also preserve the people,” Sanchez said.
The program is in its early stages and will begin with the renovation of the three casitas.
There are conversations to be had with city and Bexar County officials and organizations such as the Historic Westside Residents Association, contracts to be drafted and fundraising to do, Sanchez said. There’s also an education component: explaining to West Side residents how a community land trust works.
She does not envision Esperanza managing the trust permanently. She said it could be handed over to other entities in a few years. But she wants to ensure there is “guidance,” and Esperanza members would likely remain involved.
As housing costs have risen, community land trusts have been set up in major cities in Texas and other states.
The model was created by civil rights organizers in Georgia in 1969 to help Black families buy land. There are now over 225 land trusts in the U.S., according to Grounded Solutions Network, a national nonprofit focused on housing.
Here’s how the vehicles typically work: The trust owns the land and residents lease it, which keeps the property tax bill low. There are parameters placed on reselling the house and lease terms are lengthy, which is intended to keep it affordable in perpetuity.
Trusts are also set up for agricultural or commercial uses, said Leilah Powell, executive director of the Local Initiatives Support Corp. (LISC) in San Antonio. Some of the local nonprofits she’s spoken to are interested in building houses, not rehabilitating existing houses like Esperanza.
“The important thing behind the trust is that the basic resource that we’re not making any more of, which is the land, is being controlled and owned by the community for the benefit of the community,” Powell said. “For San Antonio, there are a lot of opportunities to use this tool.”
LISC published a policy brief in 2019 about how land trusts and community development organizations could “scale up and sustain land trusts so as to begin to impact displacement at the neighborhood level.”
David Greenberg, the brief ’s author and LISC’s vice president of research and evaluation, came to San Antonio about two years ago to discuss trusts, Powell said. There wasn’t much awareness about them then, but interest is growing.
Community land trusts were noted in a 2018 framework drafted by Mayor Ron Nirenberg’s Housing Policy Task Force. In 2019, the city joined a policy program called For Everyone Home to sketch out the antidisplacement aspects of that framework.
The proposed policies include setting up a community land trust, which would likely take three to five years and involve various city departments, according to the report. The city has been holding online events and asking the public for input on the policies, and said it will change the report based on that.
“There isn’t one silver bullet related to affordable housing or community revitalization,” Powell said. “It’s a comprehensive set of solutions that we have to use together, and land trusts are an important piece of that because they give you control of the resource.”
Esperanza’s trust and demolition fund are part of an array of initiatives to help preserve the West Side’s housing and culture.
The organization is restoring casitas and building adobe structures to use for its educational and artistic events and internet services. It is also turning the old Ruben’s Ice House into a museum devoted to the West Side’s history and rehabilitating Lerma’s Nite Club, one of the longest-running live conjunto venues in South Texas.
Esperanza got approval last year from the city to designate its hub, Rinconcito de Esperanza, as a historic district. The organization also fought the San Antonio Housing Authority’s plan to partner with developer NRP Group to raze Alazán Courts and replace the public housing complex with mixed-income apartments.
The agency scrapped the proposal in January, pledging to instead rebuild the complex and replace the units.