Implementation Plan for the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust to Operate as a Land Bank

The purpose of this plan is to provide an implementation framework for The Maggie Walker Community Land Trust (MWCLT) to utilize as it establishes its land banking operations. Through land banking, the MWCLT has an opportunity to address three interconnected issues in Richmond; a lack of affordable housing, a concentration of disadvantaged neighborhoods, and extensive tax delinquency. Currently 44% of all households in Richmond are cost burdened, and the majority of these cost burdened households, 92% of them, are low income households. The vast majority of these cost burdened, low-income households are located within Richmond’s disadvantaged neighborhoods. Richmond suffers from concentration of disadvantaged neighborhoods through its East End, North Side, and South Side. These disadvantaged neighborhoods often suffer from lower incomes, lower home values, and higher vacancy rates than the city average while also lacking adequate access to food and employment opportunities. In addition to cost burdened, low-income households, these disadvantaged neighborhoods are also home to concentrations of tax delinquent properties. There are roughly 7,500 tax delinquent properties in Richmond and these properties account for $35,000,000 in delinquent taxes owed to the city. While the presence of these tax delinquent properties are certainly an obstacle for these disadvantaged neighborhoods, they also present these neighborhoods with opportunities. Through capitalizing on its land banking authority, the MWCLT can utilize these tax delinquent properties as opportunities to address the affordable housing and community needs through these disadvantaged neighborhoods. In order for the MWCLT to do so, this plan is providing the MWCLT with a set of goals, objectives, and actions, as well as an implementation outline, that will allow for the MWCLT to become a transparent, streamlined, and strategic organization that repurposes tax delinquent properties into uses that that address community needs. Through the implementation of this plan, the MWCLT will be able to establish a continuous system of sustained community input, a relationship with the city, a structure of property acquisition, maintenance, and disposition, a system of asset management, and be able to conceptualize the role of the land bank within the neighborhoods it will operate within.