Once the Smoketown Community Land Trust was created, Theresa Boyd got to work reaching out to community members at various events. Smoketown residents could scan a QR code to fill out a survey about what kind of affordable housing would best serve their needs.
Boyd said the survey results gave her a good idea of what the community wanted: the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, accessibility features, recreation spaces, community gardens and walking paths.
“I'm not lip service, you know? I don't want to talk at them. I want them to come and have a conversation with us,” she said.
The Smoketown Community Land Trust launched in late 2023 with the help of River City Housing and Bates Community Development Corporation. Boyd worked as a housing specialist for Bates, River City Housing and the land trust to get it off the ground.
Boyd has over 20 years of experience in housing policy and partnership development. She said her goal is to strengthen the trust’s housing portfolio, funding and sponsorship opportunities, provide home ownership workshops and gain the community's trust.
“Our biggest thing so far as executive director is really to go to the community, because at the heart of the community land trust is the residents,” she recently told LPM News.
A community land trust was presented by Grounded Solutions Network, a national nonprofit organization that works to preserve permanently affordable housing, as a solution following a third-party housing needs assessment ordered by Louisville Metro and released in 2019. It found a major shortage of affordable housing in Louisville – at least 31,000 units of housing for the lowest income households.
Residents have been concerned about gentrification, rising housing costs and the risk of displacement in Smoketown, a historic Black neighborhood. The land trust model aims to tackle those problems by keeping the prices of homes stable.
First, a nonprofit buys land to develop affordable housing on. Then, residents can buy those homes and enter long-term leases of the land they’re on. To keep the homes affordable for future occupants, land trusts can prioritize reselling homes to income-eligible buyers. The Smoketown Community Land Trust plans to focus on buyers who make 80% or less of the area’s median income, which in Louisville amounts to less than $77,100 for a family of four.
Experts say the model helps people build wealth through homeownership. Boyd said the Smoketown Community Land Trust will offer homebuyer workshops for prospective residents.Boyd said, the Community Land Trust’s board decided in 2023 to work with partners to build five homes on Hancock Street near the Camp Edwards Community Center with River City Housing as the developer, and polled residents on what they wanted to see built. They’re currently in the planning phase.
“Our focus right now is individual residential housing. So when we speak of the first five homes that we will build, that is our focus, getting people housed, because that is the most immediate need,” Boyd said.
Land trust takes shape
The Smoketown Community Land Trust was spearheaded by REBOUND, Inc., a nonprofit housing developer, which was awarded the contract to help establish a community land trust.
In 2022, the group was gifted one acre of a vacant lot in Smoketown. South of Broadway, the property — formerly the site of the Louisville Slugger factory and bound by Finzer, Jacob, Jackson and Preston Streets — was split in half by the donor, the Community Foundation of Louisville.The western half of the lot was given to REBOUND, which plans to eventually transfer the land to the land trust. The eastern portion was gifted to LACE, a community grocery effort that fell through in late 2024. After that, REBOUND took over the property that was meant for the grocery store.
REBOUND is expected to transfer the two-acre lot to the Smoketown Community Land Trust after it gains tax-exempt status as a nonprofit. The trust is still awaiting that approval, Boyd said.
Development on the lot will be a multi-year project, Boyd said, in part because the lot is a brownfield. Workers will need to check for contamination, work with the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States’ Department of Housing and Urban Development and the city, and get community input on what residents want to see on the site.
Last year, they began reaching out to residents with surveys and polls, Boyd said.
“Our 14-person board isn't going to go over there with hard hats and say, ‘This is what we're giving to our community.’ When we talk about what's going to go on the lot, again, our visioning our community surveys and our discussion panels, that's where our community will decide what's going to go on,” she said.
Boyd said the land trust plans to have community events and discussion panels based on information collected by resident surveys in February and March.
