To find permanent housing, he turned to the People’s Community Land Trust, formed by the Housing Justice League, The Guild and American Friends Service Committee. Last year, the trust bought a nine-unit apartment building on Elm Street for $1.5 million, before an investor could swoop in, purchase it and raise rents.

Under the land trust, old residents can stay in the building without fear of eviction, and new middle-income residents like Eckstein can find housing in a neighborhood they might one day be priced out of.

The cream colored brick building on Elm Street is just northwest of downtown and about a five-minute drive from the Mercedes-Benz Stadium. It’s located on a block dotted with expansive, green grass lots, hinting at the possibilities and perils in a city undergoing rapid development.

But in this small corner of Atlanta, housing advocates and community groups hope that land trusts will take hold and provide some measure of stability to the changing landscape.

“That model is empowering communities through being stewards and land conservators and also a place where people can come and commune, organize, strategize and preserve their culture,” said Alison Johnson, executive director of the Housing Justice League.

Johnson said the organizations behind the acquisition have traveled around the country to learn from other community groups — including one in Boston’s Chinatown — fighting corporate takeovers of communities and gentrification. But the model has seeds in Leesburg, Georgia, where civil rights activists formed a trust in the late 1960s to help Black farmers devastated after generations of land loss through Jim Crow laws.

Elm Street is a new twist on the idea, freeing residents from the whims of landlords who might hike their rents, and giving them a hand in managing and maintaining the property.

Speaking to a reporter inside the apartment, Eckstein noted the narrow kitchen and compared the unit to a “tiny home.” Not that he was complaining. The two-bedroom Marietta apartment was about $1,800 a month. The rent here is a little over $1,200 a month, in a city where the median rent for a two-bedroom is about $2,200 a month.

Credit: Zachary Toth

Credit: Zachary Toth

National push

Amanda Rhein is executive director of Atlanta Land Trust, which was not involved with the Elm Street purchase. But it operates under the same principal.

The trust buys up land dotted along the rapidly developing Beltline to preserve affordable housing. First, the trust separates ownership of the house from ownership of the land. Next, it sells the home at an affordable price to a buyer while keeping the land in trust.

“We enter into a long-term ground lease with the homeowner that ties together the house and the land. When that homeowner is ready to sell, they sell the house to another income-qualified family for an affordable price, paying forward the benefit of an affordable home,” she said.

Atlanta Land Trust has a goal of acquiring 300 homes by 2025. So far, it has about 60 homes in the trust and has another 140 either under construction or in the permit or design phase, according to Rhein.

Atlanta Land Trust and The People’s Community Land Trust are part of a movement across the country that has seen community groups in cities, including Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore and Boston, help residents claim a stake — no matter how small — in their neighborhoods.

Land trusts are one prong of the approach. But a “community stewardship trust” is another. Under that real estate strategy, community investors own a stake in mixed-use developments with affordable housing and space for local businesses.

The Guild is headed by founder and CEO Nikishka Iyengar, who is pursuing the real estate model in Atlanta. She said loosened federal and state securities laws have made it easier for local groups, residents and businesses to invest in developments.

Under the Invest Georgia Exemption created in 2011, The Guild can invest without having to make an expansive and expensive filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the founder.

“Now that capital is returning to these historically Black neighborhoods and driving up land prices, other cities are grappling with the same thing and creating models where instead of just developers extracting that wealth out of these communities, [they] build those investment opportunities for existing residents,” she said.

The Guild is converting a commercial building at 918 Dill Ave. in the Capitol View neighborhood in southwest Atlanta. It partnered with residents, community groups and small business owners to redevelop the abandoned building built in the 1930s.

Using the community stewardship trust model, The Guild says that the development will include 18 affordable rental units up to 750-square feet that are priced at 60% to 80% of the area median income, with an income limit of about $69,000 a year for a two-person household.

The development will have grocery store on the ground floor with locally-sourced food, and space for Black- and Brown-owed restaurants. Although the building is 7,000 square feet, the eventual space will be 21,000 square feet, according to The Guild.

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC

Too little, too late?

Metro Atlanta added almost 63,000 new residents between 2023 and 2024. The region is projected to have almost 8 million residents by 2050. Housing advocates and community groups fear some Black families and businesses risk being deprived of a stake in the city’s future.

Foluke Nunn, a community organizer with the American Friends Service Committee, said many neighborhoods have already tipped over the edge. To create more land trusts like the one on Elm Street, state and local officials need to support them with public dollars, she argued.

“We’re in a very precarious position right now when it comes to housing affordability. But I don’t think it’s too late to slow things down,” she said.

But land trusts and community stewardship trusts are not a “silver bullet,” according to Iyengar. She agreed public funding is vitally important to test the ideas at scale.

“I can never say it’s too late because that will mean giving up on the people that are still fighting in these neighborhoods,” Iyengar said. “But we’re no longer a majority Black city and that is something for the city of Atlanta to really grapple with.”

Eckstein now works full-time at a public health nonprofit. He said he is settled in Vine City, and enjoys the community garden across the street, walks to a nearby park, and runs in the morning along the Beltline trail. He is slowly digging himself out of his hole, he said, paying down his debt and rebuilding his credit.

He doesn’t think he would have been able to do it without the People’s Community Land Trust.

“An opportunity to get into stabilized housing has given me an ability to breathe again,” he said.