Abby Hoover
Managing Editor

On Friday, July 21, Jerusalem Farm welcomed the community to tour Northeast Kansas City’s first Kansas City Community Land Trust home at 406 Garfield Avenue in Pendleton Heights.

Jerusalem Farm, the nonprofit organizing the land trust in Northeast, hosted lunch and an open house from 12-1 p.m., and the new homeowners graciously invited folks inside to tour their home.

They moved into the three-bedroom, one bathroom home on July 10. The home has off street parking in the back, a spacious yard, and is practically new inside.

While the idea of a community land trust is new in Northeast, other neighborhoods, like Marlborough, have seen success.

A community land trust is a shared equity homeownership model providing assistance to those earning less than the Area Median Income to be able to participate in the wealth building of homeownership.
The land trust retains the land, and the house is sold with a deed restriction. This deed restriction limits the resale value, to ensure that the house will always be attainable for individuals at 60% of the area-median income.

This particular home was owned by an investor for 10 years, just down the street from Jerusalem Farm.
“We just saw families would move in, they’d move out months later, and it would sit empty for a long time, and then it was empty for like a year and a half,” Jerusalem Farm Project Director Jordan Schiele said. “So we tried to track down the owners, and we probably overpaid for it just to get it out of their grip.”

It was a complete rehabilitation. When they purchased the house, the floor joists were sitting on the dirt.
The house had a new roof donated by Easton Roofing, interior design support from Urban Sprout, plumbing by Lexington, spray foam donated by The Hayes Company, and will have solar panels installed soon with support from Solar Design Studio. The labor was completed by worksite companions in Jerusalem Farm’s Dignified Workforce Program, and the waterproofing and foundation repair was done by an AmeriCorps team.

Learn more about Jerusalem Farm’s work with the community land trust at https://www.jerusalemfarm.org/s/our-common-home-land-trust?language=en_US.