Bob Adams of the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust addresses Richmond City Council. (Photo by Sarah King)
The Maggie Walker Community Land Trust presented its first annual plan during Monday's informal Richmond City Council meeting, marking progress toward a more rapid movement of tax-delinquent or vacated properties in gentrifying census tracts to the land trust, which will, in turn, provide more accessible homeownership to low- and moderate-income city residents.
City Council adopted an ordinance designating MWCLT as the official land bank for the city on Feb. 26, making the land trust the official entity to help revitalize some of the tax-delinquent and vacant properties that would otherwise be auctioned off or remain vacant.
“Land banks transform problem properties into community assets,” says MWCLT Executive Director Bob Adams, noting there are roughly 200 land trusts around the country. After legislation passed by the General Assembly in 2016 allowing localities to use tools such as land banks, several land trusts are now at work in Virginia, of which Richmond's was the first.
A Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between the land trust and the city mandates that an annual plan be presented to Council. On Monday, Adams presented the MOA and outlined the priorities of the land bank through June 2019.
“The bank can be a tool to address this issue; one of the ways to do that is to make affordable housing a priority of the plan,” Adams says, “and indeed the MOA we entered into with the city does just that.”
Land banks partner with communities to draft and implement strategies for returning blighted, vacant and underutilized properties to productive uses.
The Maggie Walker Community Land Trust is the first community land trust in the nation to be designated a land bank. The entity is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, formed in 2016 with the mission of providing high-quality homes and homeownership to low- and moderate-income households to build generational wealth over time.
According to August 2018 data from the city finance department, there are roughly 7,000 tax-delinquent properties in the city — totaling about 10 percent of all parcels — 2,000 of which have been delinquent for five or more years, in addition to roughly $31 million owed in back taxes.
”The annual plan in front of you was developed through input from community members on the advisory group, but the plan also issues a much deeper, longer-term community engagement strategy that will begin this year and continue every year that the land bank is in place,” Adams says. “It addresses the needs, especially in the history in Richmond, where communities of color in particular have faced long-term patterns of housing discrimination and were significantly excluded from land acquisition.”
The land trust uses a shared-equity model of home ownership, meaning the land trust sells the homes but retains ownership of the land. This allows for the overall cost of a new home to be lower for the potential buyer, because the cost of the land beneath the home is subtracted from the sale price. When the homeowner sells their home, they retain half the increase in equity from the property value, and the remainder of equity stays in the home — lowering the cost for the next buyer.
The land trust can build high-quality homes at an affordable price through partnerships with Richmond Metropolitan Habitat for Humanity and Project:HOMES, in what MWCLT chairwoman Laura Lafayette says is an attempt to not “reinvent the wheel.”
Lafayette says she hopes that after submitting the plan, the land trust will be able to work with the city attorney's office to begin funneling properties to the land bank “at a more rapid pace."
“We've had some properties come to the land trust in a direct-sale process, but what we're now asking for from the city is we want a substantial number of properties flowing to the land bank,” Lafayette says. “We'd love to have properties flow between now and the end of the year, but certainly by the end of the first quarter of next year we'd expect to have properties in the land bank.”
Lafayette says ideally the land trust would like to have 50 parcels a year “pushed over to us,” but “we’ll have to wait and see if that’s feasible.”
Since breaking ground on its first property in June 2017, the land trust has at least two dozen properties in some phase of acquisition, development or purchase, Lafayette says.
During his presentation to City Council, Adams highlighted five census tracts identified in the city as top priorities for the land bank in the coming year because of their potential for gentrification or other limiting factors such as high poverty or low food accessibility: two in Church Hill, two in Highland Park and one in the Swansboro neighborhood in South Side.
According to data from the City of Richmond Food Policy Task Force, more than 40 percent of city residents live in high-poverty, low-food-access neighborhoods. From 2000 to 2016, median rent in the city of Richmond rose 74 percent, but median household incomes during the same span only grew by 36 percent, according to census and American Community Survey data.
In neighborhoods such as Church Hill in the city’s East End, homeownership is on the rebound — for some residents. According to census and American Community Survey data, the number of black homeowners declined by more than 400 individuals from 2000 to 2015; in contrast, the number of white homeowners increased by 468 people during the same period.
The average home price in Church Hill increased from $165,000 in 2012 to $215,000 in 2016, according to records from the city assessor’s office; from June 2017 to June 2018, the average home in Church Hilll was on the market for eight days, according to the Central Virginia Regional Multiple Listing Service.
In 2018, Habitat for Humanity and Project:HOMES began rehabilitating more than 30 homes in the Maymont and Randolph neighborhoods to sell to interested buyers earning less than 80 percent of the area median income (AMI). Potential buyers must also complete a series of steps, including homebuyer education and counseling, prior to loan approval and signing documents.
“We have a really good partnership in the Randolph community with Habitat and Project:HOMES, where [they’ve] taken properties that used to belong to the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority, they’ve renovated them and have then sold them to the land trust, and we've found buyers,” Lafayette says, noting that the RRHA recently approved the disposition of 56 parcels, mostly in the Blackwell community in South Side. The neighborhood is under consideration for historic district designation by the state, opening it up to more rapid development and rising home prices.
“Not all of those are buildable lots, but once they put [a request for proposals] out, I’m hopeful that a number of nonprofits who work in Blackwell — Southside Community Development Housing Corp., Habitat, Project:HOMES, Better Housing Coalition — that we collectively respond to that RFP in some way and so that the land trust will be able to operate fairly extensively in Blackwell,” Lafayette says.
She notes that community partners anticipate “upward pressure” in prices for homes in the neighborhood, assuming the historic district boundaries are expanded in Blackwell.
“So the land trust represents a great opportunity to get into Blackwell while we still can have a mix of incomes in Blackwell and preserve the opportunity for people of modest means to live in Blackwell,” Lafayette says.
