PHOTO | WEST SIDE COMMUNITY LAND TRUST

West Side Community Land Trust executive director Charis Blackmon is on the forefront of making affordable housing a reality in historically Black neighborhoods where lower-income residents are under stress from rapid gentrification.

Charis Blackmon is one of the highest-profile champions of affordable housing in Charlotte’s vulnerable communities.

Blackmon, president of West Side Community Land Trust, since 2018, is responsible for generating initiatives that allow residents of historically Black urban neighborhoods beset by gentrification to remain in place. In an interview with The Post, the Charlotte native detailed the challenges of funding initiatives, growing public awareness of threats to affordability in working-class neighborhoods and the importance of workforce housing.

Responses are edited for brevity and clarity.

CP: The trust recently earned a two-year, 93,750 grant from Ally Charitable Foundation as part of its community giving program for grassroots organizations in Charlotte. How will that gift help?

CB: Ally is one of our trusted partners. This will be our second grant from them, so I’m really excited about this opportunity. It's a multi-year grant, so we’ll receive funding this year and will also receive funding next year. In our tenure with the land trust, it has been a challenge to receive direct investment for the development of affordable units, so we’ve gotten quite a bit of support for operating dollars and such to cover our overhead expenses, but it has been more challenging to get the funds necessary to really get the units on the ground.

One of the things that I'm grateful for with the current and past Ally funding is that this funding is available for us to use to actually invest in the creation of homes. I am most excited about that. The dollars that we are receiving this year will go towards the repayment of our acquisition funds [for] the Nathaniel Carr site … that’s also monumental in that we’re able to create 120 units of permanently affordable senior housing on a historic piece of land along the West Boulevard corridor and it wouldn't be possible without a conglomerate of partners, including Ally. (Carr developed the first Black suburb in west Charlotte).

CP: Considering how important or how important the conversation has become regarding affordable housing and gentrification, are you surprised that funding affordable housing is still a struggle in Charlotte?

CB: I’m not surprised. There’s an array of funding that is available largely for multifamily developments. Our work with the land trust has been just affordable home ownership as a path to building wealth to generate wealth in historically disenfranchised communities which are largely the communities that are experiencing the impact of gentrification and displacement.

We haven’t seen as many innovative funding models available to support the creation of home ownership units. I’m somewhat not surprised because I also recognize that’s a part of the status quo, so I’m going to just be candid.

This is this is not a new battle with gentrification and displacement. To me it is very similar and runs parallel to the effects of urban renewal and redlining, and I think with current practices that incentivizes the development of denser units, which we know is necessary, that also perpetuates that same cycle.

CP: Are there any signs of change?

CB: We are seeing some shifts. City dollars, like housing trust loan dollars, are now supporting the development of homeownership units, whereas that wasn't the case before. We’re starting to see some shifts and changes in the Charlotte landscape to provide those types of opportunities.

CP: How has the landscape has changed since the day you walked in the door to take over the land trust?

CB: I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve noticed a lot of changes that have just happened in the general landscape of our city as far as housing goes, opportunities for various groups, and I’ve worked in the past with other nonprofits that are focused on social justice, issues, and challenges.

Just to see how our city presents itself as progressive in some ways, but then regressive and others has been a very interesting journey and I would say for the land trust when I started back in 2018, the organization was 100% volunteer run. It was founded by neighbors and those were the individuals that were in the trenches making this work happen.

We have grown exponentially since that time. Our budget was much smaller. I think we had a six-figure budget of about $120,000. Now our budget is around the $3.8 million mark.

At that time, it was a vision, it was a concept. Neighbors just wanted to fight back against the gentrification that was happening in their neighborhood, and so they had this idea of how to leverage that community land trust model here in Charlotte but now over that four-year period, we now have a portfolio of about 18 parcels, a combination of single family and multifamily. We have about nine homes that are in our portfolio. We also have 120 unit … development that we’ll be breaking ground on this year.

We have a pool of potential homebuyers that are residents within our community. We’ve been very intentional about not listing our homes on the [Multiple Listing Service] but working directly with people that live in these communities and are most proximate to the challenges and are most impacted by those challenges.

CP: Your organization is the West Side Land Trust, but in the future, are there plans to spread to other parts of Charlotte that face the same types of challenges?

CB: Well, there is absolutely opportunity to expand. Our mission is to create permanently affordable housing with community centered development in West Charlotte and beyond. Our membership base a couple of years ago actually voted to allow us to expand our focus area beyond west Charlotte to serve the larger Charlotte-Mecklenburg community, so we actually are currently undergoing a rebranding campaign.

We also have worked towards incremental expansion, so we’ve identified some potential partner communities in other parts of Charlotte that are experiencing similar challenges to those communities along the westside. We are looking to expand but to do it in a way that is sustainable for our organization.

CP: When you talk about helping neighbors who face being booted out of their homes because of gentrification, some people will argue that’s just capitalism at its best. You can buy the land. But it looks like what trust is a holistic way to make sure that everybody gets something out of Charlotte’s popularity in terms of people moving here.

CB: You’re 100% accurate. We seek to demonstrate that it’s possible to revitalize communities without displacement and without gentrifying them and changing the history and the culture that has existed there for so long.

Although we are the very first community land trust here in Charlotte, there are over 300 land trusts across the nation, so this is a proven model that is evidence-based and has worked well in several other localities. We know that it’s possible to be able to revitalize communities while also creating that staying power.

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