West Charlotte land trust buys land for 120 affordable senior apartments
The West Side Community Land Trust has purchased land for 120 senior apartments on West Boulevard, the nonprofit’s first foray into multi-family housing.
The land trust recently bought more than 4.5 acres on West Boulevard near Tyvola Road and is working with Georgia-based affordable housing developer The Paces Foundation to build the Historic Nathaniel Carr Senior Community. It is named for the revered creator of the first neighborhood in the West Boulevard corridor, built specifically for Black families.
Acquiring already scarce vacant land in west Charlotte is critical to preserving access to affordable housing, said Charis Blackmon, the land trust’s executive director. The nonprofit works to address rapid gentrification and displacement in historically Black west Charlotte neighborhoods by building and preserving homes to keep them permanently affordable.
This is the first multi-family project in its portfolio and the largest in its history. With constant development underway across the west side, Blackmon said residents wanted a say in what would happen with this property, wanting “to preserve the rich history of this land.”
“We’re able to ensure that residents maintain the power over this land forever and ever in perpetuity” and preserve affordable housing, she said.
The project is especially meaningful for its location and namesake, said Rickey Hall, chair of the West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition and former land trust board chair.
Nathaniel Carr, a farmer and developer, and his wife, Lizzie, created the Carr Heights neighborhood for Black home buyers in 1924, Hall said. The Carrs owned the property where the apartments will be built, and donated land to build Shiloh Baptist Church on Elmin Road adjacent to the site, Hall said.
The Carr property is “a landmark for offsetting displacement and gentrification, and preserving housing opportunity for families in perpetuity,” he said.
“We offset those types of negative impacts and actually build a greater economic base and a more vibrant community in the West Boulevard corridor.”
Bank of America has donated $600,000 in unrestricted grants to the land trust, of which a portion will be used for the Nathaniel Carr project. The development previously received $2.2 million from the city’s Housing Trust Fund and $2 million from the private Charlotte Housing Opportunity Investment Fund.
“We all know in Charlotte land is at a premium ... We’ve got to seize opportunities like this for the community,” said Jenny Ward, community relations manager for Bank of America. “The land trust model is centered around the residents and it’s led by the residents, and to us that is the most powerful model.”
The one- and two-bedroom apartments will rent for between $474 and $1,516, affordable to seniors 55 and older with incomes between 30 and 80% of the area median income. The plan is eventually to shift the units to affordable homeownership, Blackmon said.
Construction is expected to begin in September.
A race to preserve
The land trust, which launched in 2018, acquires homes to sell to residents but retains control of the land beneath them, which reduces costs for the buyer and ensures the property will stay permanently affordable.
Land trusts like Charlotte’s can sell homes to low- and moderate-income families for well below market rate because participants agree to modest increases of their home’s value while they own it, so it can be resold at an affordable price if they choose to move.
Similarly, the land trust will lease the land to the developer, reducing construction costs for the project.
Among its other projects, West Side CLT relocated two historic “shotgun” houses from uptown and received donated houses from three families that planned to build larger homes on their properties.
Last summer it completed construction of its first new build, the “Tuck House” on Tuckaseegee Road in Enderly Park. It was intended to sell for around $170,000 to a buyer with income around 60% of the area median income, or about $50,520 for a family of four.
That’s well below the median sales price in 28208 ZIP code — where the Tuck House is located — which was $345,000 in April. That was a nearly 31% increase over the previous April, according to data from Canopy MLS.
This story was originally published June 2, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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