Projects
For Which We've Provided Financing:
Equity
Trust Fund Borrower Projects
Athens
Land Trust - Athens, GA
This program is unusual in that it combines the environmental
goals typical of conservation land trusts and the housing and community
development goals typical of community land trusts. Working in a low-income,
primarily African American neighborhood threatened by gentrification in
this university town, ALT is acquiring and rehabilitating homes to be sold
to low-income families, with the land trust retaining ownership of the land
and leasing it to homeowners on terms that will assure that when the homes
are eventually resold they will be passed on to other low-income families
at affordable prices. Equity Trust has provided financing for the acquisition
and rehabilitation of ALT homes.
Equity Trust has also made a loan to a group that came together, with the
support of ALT, to purchase and preserve the last 5-acre parcel of undeveloped,
wooded land in the neighborhood. The group has now succeeded in selling
the land to the city for the amount they had paid for it, and the city has
agreed to allow the development rights to be transferred permanently to
ALT, as Equity Trust had advocated.
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