Land trust wants to keep East San Jose apartments affordable

At a time when rising rents are forcing people out of their homes, one Santa Clara County nonprofit is offering an alternative solution to keep tenants from being displaced.

The South Bay Community Land Trust is looking to acquire three apartment buildings on Virginia Avenue in East San Jose to keep rent affordable — by taking them out of the hands of a private owner and putting them into the hands of residents. Once the buildings are purchased, rent will not increase for the tenants that live there. In some cases, the land trust is even looking to lower costs for families spending a majority of their income on rent.

“The houses that used to be affordable aren’t affordable anymore,” Sandy Perry, land trust board vice president, told San José Spotlight. “This guarantees that the building stays affordable long into the future.”

Rents for one and two-bedroom apartments in San Jose have surged nearly 50% since 2010, while salaries for low-income residents have declined when accounting for inflation, according to city data.

Nearly half of residents are rent burdened, spending more than one-third of their income on housing, city data found. Three cities in the county — San Jose, Los Gatos and Mountain View — have rent control policies, with limitations. San Jose caps rent increases at 5%, but only covers homes built and occupied before 1979, which is approximately 38,000 apartments. Los Gatos caps it to 5% or 70% of the Consumer Price Index, whichever is higher, and Mountain View caps it to 100% of the CPI. Duplexes are exempt from rent control in all three cities. State law bars cities from limiting rent hikes on single-family homes and apartments built after 1995.

Once a tenant moves out, however, the landlord can raise rent to market rates regardless of whether it’s rent stabilized. From 2012 to 2017, Santa Clara County lost about half of its unsubsidized affordable homes as people moved out of rent-stabilized apartments, according to a report by Enterprise Community Partners.

“In expensive housing markets like Silicon Valley, rents are out of reach for everyday folks,” SV@Home Deputy Director Josh Ishimatsu told San José Spotlight. “The benefits of having land trusts like the South Bay Community Land Trust buying properties is that they can take the land costs out of the equation and make rents more affordable, in perpetuity.”

Perry is part of the group that founded the community land trust in 2019 to combat the broken system. Community land trusts are nonprofits controlled by residents who aim to take housing off the open market and place it in a land trust for 100 years. Then it can’t be sold without all the residents approving.

In addition, land trusts give tenants the option to buy the property at an affordable rate, while the trust owns the land underneath to ensure affordability will be kept for decades to come.

Land trusts offer the community a paradigm shift, one that de-commodifies housing in a market vying for profit, Perry said.

The South Bay Community Land Trust has support from the 18 households and property owner to purchase the Virginia Avenue apartments. The nonprofit still has to raise the funds to acquire the complex, and rehabilitating the buildings alone is estimated at roughly $5 million. Once acquired, it will rehabilitate the building based on residents’ needs. Since it’s an old building, updating the plumbing and electrical systems is a top priority, as well as changing the carpet.

The land trust’s efforts are especially important for the Latino families who have lived in the Virginia Apartments for decades, including Maricela Betancourt-Flores, 61, who has called it her home for 30 years. When she first moved into her one-bedroom apartment in the 1990s, she paid $500 a month for rent. Today rent is $1,400, something she is barely able to cover earning $16 an hour as a janitor at a warehouse. She said sometimes the lights go off in the apartment, there are plumbing issues and parts of her floor are caved in, longstanding issues the landlord hasn’t fixed.

“The affordable rent is very important to us because we don’t earn a lot,” Betancourt-Flores told San José Spotlight through an interpreter. “Everything goes up except income.”
If rent continues to rise, Betancourt-Flores said she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to keep up. Having the land trust acquire the building would ensure she can stay in her home.

The Virginian Apartments is the land trust’s second endeavor. Last year, the group acquired a fourplex building in downtown San Jose, home to 10 low-income residents of color, most who have previously experienced homelessness. The nonprofit is also raising money from the community to put into a “people’s preservation fund” for the Virginian Apartments and future projects.

“The point of the land trust is to bring it back to serve people,” Perry told San José Spotlight. “Housing is a human right, and in order for it to be a human right, it has to be produced for people to live in and not just for investors to profit from.”

Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X, formerly known as Twitter.