Denver's Urban Land Conservancy as a BTMFBA implementer

The previous entry, "Nonprofits need to BTMFBA too," re-mentions that nonprofits have to have a real estate and facilities strategy as part of master planning, that just like artists, they can't expect real estate developers to plan for them, plus they need to be prepared in the face of strong, money-driven real estate markets.

Almost immediately after I published that entry, there was an article in my newsfeed, "How this nonprofit in Westwood is avoiding being gentrified out of the area," from the Denverite, about how the in the neighborhood is able to control its real estate destiny by partnering with the (Denver) Urban Land Conservancy.  From the article:

This month, Re:Vision, a Westwood nonprofit that focuses on improving food access and food security, and the Urban Land Conservancy, a real estate nonprofit that aims to preserve communities and prevent displacement, announced they’d be collaborating through a real estate partnership that allows each organization, especially Re:Vision, to continue benefiting the westside. 

“This partnership has been years in the making,” said Sarah Harman, ULC’s vice president of real estate. “I think it was around 2019 that ULC and Re:Vision really started talking about what we might do together. And that brainstorming resulted in this new partnership with Re:Vision and ULC’s continued and deepened engagement with the Westwood neighborhood.” 

Re:Vision, which started in 2007, owns and operates the RISE Westwood Campus, a community hub that hosts an urban farm, the nonprofit’s no-cost grocery, Cultura Chocolate, a commissary kitchen and several other businesses and community needs. The campus was previously a junkyard, and Re:Vision purchased the site with a $1.2 million loan from the city in 2014 with some stipulations, one being the nonprofit had to use the site for community use.

Typically, land conservancies and land trust deal with open space and farmland, although urban-focused land trusts tend to focus on multiunit housing.

And that's an issue here too, as it appears as if the Urban Land Conservancy is also focused on adding housing to the site over the long term.

But the ULC is also focused on providing and preserving "shared office space for nonprofits and mission-minded organizations."

While I still believe in the need for overarching organizations like SEMAEST and other types of community development corporations to focus on this kind of property preservation specifically, this is another model for accomplishing it.