As U.S. cities confront a widening affordability and displacement crisis, ten years of community land ownership in Seattle’s Central District offers aworking blueprint
SEATTLE, WA — On a warm Sunday in July, East Union Street in Seattle’s Central District closed to traffic and filled instead with folding chairs, food tables and the sound of a live band covering old-school R&B. Neighbors who had known each other for decades stood alongside newcomers drawn by the music. Children took Polaroid photos in front of a wall honoring the Black leaders who shaped the neighborhood. An installation called Our Family Tree invited passersby to answer a single question: What legacy are you growing?
The gathering, called ReUnion On Union, marked ten years of work by Africatown Community Land Trust (ACLT), the nonprofit that has spent the past decade acquiring, developing and stewarding land in the Central District. It followed the Juneteenth Freedom Festival held a month earlier at Jimi Hendrix Park, another milestone in a summer built around a single theme: “Still Here. Still Building.”
Beneath the celebration sits a harder story that has become familiar in cities across the country. The Central District has been the heart of Seattle’s Black community since the 19th century, when Black pioneer and entrepreneur William Grose became one of the city’s first landowners, selling plots to newly arriving Black families. In the decades since, municipal disinvestment, gentrification and skyrocketing housing costs have pushed many longtime Black homeowners and Black-owned businesses out, and the neighborhood’s Black population has fallen sharply, from 90 percent to nearly 10 percent today.
That pattern of displacement, familiar in Black neighborhoods from Atlanta to Oakland to Washington, D.C., has pushed cities nationwide to search for ways to stop the loss of the communities that built them. ACLT’s answer is simple: Black land ownership as the cornerstone of a stable and thriving city.
“Our vision is a future where Seattle’s Black community is not just remembered, but thrives through community ownership, cultural preservation, and shared prosperity,” said K. Wyking Garrett, president and CEO of Africatown Community Land Trust. “What we’ve built here over the past decade is proof that a community can hold its ground and grow at the same time. Every city wrestling with displacement is looking for a model that works. We believe this is one.”
Founded in 2016, ACLT operates on a core premise: land held under community control cannot be sold out from under the people who depend on it. Whether developing property directly or partnering with market-rate developers to deliver larger projects, the organization works to keep land under long-term community ownership, using it to build affordable housing, support community businesses and preserve cultural space.
The results are now what Garrett calls ‘Living Monuments,’ odes to the past that are facilitating the future. The Liberty Bank Building transformed the site of Liberty Bank, the second Black-owned bank west of the Mississippi, into a mixed-use development with affordable housing, Black-owned businesses and cultural anchors. Today it is home to the world-renowned Communion restaurant, Earl’s Cuts & Styles, a neighborhood institution for nearly 35 years, and an Ethiopian coffee shop.
Across the street, the former Midtown Center block now houses the Midtown Square development, featuring Black-owned businesses alongside the award-winning Africatown Plaza building. The partnership between market-rate and nonprofit affordable housing developers has been lauded as a model in community-led development, providing an additional 124 units of affordable housing in the neighborhood.
Benu Community Home and the William Grose Center for Cultural Innovation, named for the neighborhood’s first Black landowner, provide much-needed shelter for the unhoused, workforce development and small business support. Each project shares the same underlying structure: land that stays in community hands, indefinitely.
That structure is what has drawn attention beyond Seattle. Community land trusts exist in cities nationwide, but few have paired the model as directly with cultural preservation and Black-led development as ACLT has in the Central District. As affordability crises deepen in cities of every size, and as more communities search for alternatives to displacement-driven growth, ACLT’s decade of work is increasingly cited as a case study in what a different outcome can look like.
That case study was on full display this summer. The Africatown-sponsored Juneteenth Freedom Festival drew more than 10,000 attendees to Jimi Hendrix Park for a day built around music, vendors and youth activations, alongside interactive educational exhibits on the neighborhood’s history and the case for reparative investment.
A month later, the ReUnion On Union block party brought the same themes to a residential block, trading festival programming for something closer to a family reunion: a shared Sunday dinner, elders and young people trading stories, and a wall of Polaroids meant to outlast the afternoon.
Both events were framed less as commemorations of the past than as evidence of a model still being built.
Organizers describe the tenth anniversary not as a finish line but as a proof point, a decade of data suggesting that community ownership, paired with cultural programming, ensures that Black families can grow and thrive in place as the city advances into the future.
“This isn’t nostalgia,” Garrett said. “This is infrastructure for the future. Land is the foundation that everything else gets built on. If we get that part right, the rest, the housing, the businesses, the culture, has a place to stand.”
ACLT says the model is designed to be replicable beyond Seattle. The organization is expanding its affordable housing development, homeownership programming, youth development and business support initiatives in the Central District in the coming year, while sharing its approach with other communities fighting displacement. For a neighborhood that has spent the last century fighting to hold its ground, the organization’s pitch is straightforward: the next ten years should look like the last ten — more land, more ownership, and more proof that a community can determine its own future.
