"Within the next year, Lexington's Davis Bottom neighborhood will begin giving way to the initial phases of the city's much-anticipated Newtown Pike extension. In its place will rise the first facets of the Southend Park Urban Village, a 25-acre community land trust that will maintain community ownership of the actual land in perpetuity while allowing residents to own the structures constructed on it.
The community land trust concept, which has been used in cities across the United States for roughly 30 years, addresses the challenge of maintaining long-term housing affordability by effectively removing the rising cost of land from the home buying equation. The Southend experiment, however, will be breaking new ground on multiple fronts, both as Lexington's first attempt at a community land trust and the first to be funded through the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) as well.
"The idea of creating a community land trust to hold the land is something extremely new in the use of federal highway funds," said Andrew Grunwald, project manager for the city's Newtown Pike Extension team. "I think it's the most complicated project that the city of Lexington has ever undertaken."
The Final Environmental Impact Statement for the project, including the redevelopment of the Southend Park Urban Village, was approved by the Federal Highway Administration on June 12. It is estimated that half of the funding for the estimated $75 million road extension project, provided primarily by the FHA and the state, will be used for the neighborhood redevelopment initiatives. The project team is currently preparing its Record of Decision (ROD), and upon its approval, the team will be authorized to begin property purchase for the project's initial phases.
The project will include the initial construction of up to 24 temporary housing units to serve as residences for families that will be displaced during construction. The reconstructed Southend Urban Village will eventually include approximately 45 single-family homes, along with duplexes, quadplexes, and apartments for a total of roughly 100 units, for which the area's 33 current resident households will be given preference.
But a neighborhood is more than the homes that are built in it, said Rev. Martina Ockerman of the Nathaniel United Methodist Mission, which is part of the Southend redevelopment project. As plans for the Southend begin to take shape, Ockerman hopes the project participants will use the opportunity to try a new community-building approach as well -- namely, to stop focusing on what the community lacks and start building on what it has.
The Nathaniel Mission is spearheading an effort called the Opportunity Project, which will use asset-mapping strategies to focus on the neighborhood's strengths and develop community partnerships to build upon them. The group brought together interested stakeholders on September 17 for the first of many exploratory community gathering sessions aimed at charting Southend's future.
"We are trying to change the whole systemic approach to community development and affordable housing," Ockerman said. "We need to bring people to the table who understand how important it is to create a wholeness in the community. You can't just give people a new house."
Decisions about the future of the community land trust will be made by a board comprised of residents, city officials and outside community members, but Ockerman sees a myriad of possibilities. She can envision synergistic combinations of senior housing and community day care centers that embrace the neighborhood's multigenerational character. She pictures community gardens and farmers markets to promote healthy eating habits, businesses ranging from small grocery stores to home maintenance service providers, and essential transportation components to connect Southend residents with the whole of Lexington. She hopes the community will become a living classroom for the University of Kentucky, building on existing health care programs run in conjunction with UK's nursing and dentistry programs.
"This is a start -- not an end," said Luther Snow, who will be serving as an independent consultant and facilitator on the Opportunity Project. Snow specializes in the asset-based development of community and social networks, a system that encourages participants to build on existing programs, talents and efforts to create locally driven opportunities for economic development. "The health and progress of this community affects all of Lexington. ... There's a big opportunity for Lexington to be a model for the country."
In addition to the federal highway funding, the Southend undertaking also has the advantage of sheer size. Roughly seven of the site's 25 acres will be allocated for residential use. The Southend plan also recommends three acres for mixed-use commercial/office/residential development, nine acres for open space and a public park, and two acres for institutional/social services to include a relocation of the Nathaniel Mission. The Southend project is large for a single community land trust location, according to Jeff Yegian, senior technical assistance provider for the Institute of Community Economics, a national community development organization that promotes environmental justice through community land trusts and community investments. Many existing community land trusts maintain comparable aggregate land holdings at scattered sites, and the numbers are growing.
"(Community land trusts) work fundamentally because people care about the communities they live in," Yegian said. "It's not the path of least resistance. There's more work involved, and more resources that have to go into it, but it is more intentional. It's a legacy project."
And while it requires a more concerted effort on the part of both community members and policymakers, the benefits of maintaining affordable neighborhoods extend beyond the geographic boundaries of the project.
"By preserving a neighborhood in the way that this project tries to do, you're avoiding the long-term removal of a population that does provide services to others in the community," Yegian said. "There's an economic benefit to avoiding that disruption, to maintaining some diversity of income in the community."
For Maranna Perkins, who has lived in the Davis Bottom neighborhood for 10 years, recognition of that economic benefit by the city overall would be a welcome change. Neighborhoods such as Davis Bottoms and Irishtown have had a poor reputation among local outsiders, including potential employers, Perkins said, and she hopes the redevelopment will change attitudes as well as infrastructure.
"People put this area down, but there's a lot of good down here," Perkins said.
Although Perkins has always seen owning a piece of land as part of the American dream, she thinks the community land trust model will be good for the neighborhood as a whole. For starters, she hopes it will help to push illegal drugs out of the community.
Perkins said she and her neighbors have always been a close-knit community willing to look out for each other, and the expected changes will make cooperation even more necessary in the future.
"We all need to work together with this road coming in," Perkins said. "It's going to teach people how to get along better. They have a goal to reach for. Maybe we can finally get the neighborhood straightened out."