South Berkeley tenants feared losing their homes after landlord’s death. A local land trust is helping them stay

The courtyard at 2627 California St., which was sold to the nonprofit Bay Area Community Land Trust in December 2024. Credit: Iris Kwok

When longtime South Berkeley resident Inti Fernandez learned from a neighbor in 2020 that his landlord had died, his initial reaction was shock. He had known her as a generous teacher who’d given him an affordable place to stay when he was struggling as a freelance filmmaker and desperate to find housing locally.

Fernandez, a single parent of two children, wondered how he and many of his close-knit neighbors could afford to stay in increasingly expensive South Berkeley. 

Surprise gave way to unease as his late landlord’s family began renovating the old apartment building and looking for buyers. Fernandez and other tenants of 2627 California St. reached out to the Bay Area Community Land Trust (BACLT), a nonprofit that aims to pull properties off the speculative market and preserve them as permanently affordable housing. In December 2024, the land trust bought the complex for $4.8 million.

Berkeley’s Small Sites program, which aims to boost affordable housing by providing funding to buy and fix up multifamily rental properties of up to 25 units, provided the lion’s share of the funding — a  $3.6 million loan. In June, the Berkeley City Council set aside $10 million over two years to fund the program.

The apartment complex at 2627 California St. was built during the 1960s by a Black family that pledged to “make it available” to those who otherwise couldn’t afford rising rent in the Bay Area. The Bay Area Community Land Trust acquired the 12-unit building in December 2024 for $4.8 million. Credit: Iris Kwok

Councilmember Ben Bartlett, who represents South Berkeley and pushed the city to allocate funding for its Small Sites program, said he feels “tremendous joy” that the initiative has protected affordable housing and twice helped South Berkeley residents stay in their community — first on a site next to a South Berkeley church and now on California St. 

Bartlett said the main challenge in further expanding the program is the high cost of purchasing real estate in Berkeley. “We only have so much money,” he said. But he’s hopeful that the new Berkeley City Council will share his values in preventing the displacement that occurs when people with resources compete with those without, he added.

The remaining $1.2 million was a mortgage from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a national nonprofit lender that supports community development projects.

When BACLT finishes renovating the apartments in April 2026, it plans to transition the 12-unit apartment complex into a housing cooperative and residents will have shared ownership of the building. Residents will be able to stay in the building while the remodel is under way, which includes roof repairs, window replacements and kitchen renovations, according to Tracy Parent, Director of BACLT.

Under the arrangement, BACLT will own the lot on which the building stands and the residents — which are mostly Black and include one Latino family — will sit on the board of trustees of a co-op entity that owns the building structure. The residents will receive training on how to operate as a co-op, including sessions on budgeting and how to ensure decisions are made democratically, and will contribute to maintenance costs and other fees from their rent.

South Berkeley resident Inti Fernandez poses for a portrait in his apartment unit. He moved into 2627 California St. in 2014, when he was working as a freelance filmmaker and struggling to find housing he could afford in Berkeley. When he learned his late landlord’s family planned to sell the apartment complex, Fernandez organized his neighbors and teamed up with the Bay Area Community Land Trust to find a way for them to stay put. Credit: Iris Kwok

The cost of minor repairs, such as calling a plumber to unclog a toilet, will also need to come out of residents’ pockets rather than a landlord’s, Fernandez said. But it’s a price Fernandez and Luqman say they are willing to pay to remain in their homes, which are still far more affordable than other options in Berkeley. (The median rent in Berkeley is $2,683, according to Zillow data.)

The land trust has “taken the worry off,” Luqman said. 

Of the 12 units in the rent-controlled building, 10 are occupied. Two are vacant: a remodeled studio apartment renting for $1,200 and a large 1-bedroom for $1,800. For current residents, monthly rents at 2627 California St. range from $1,350 to $2,200. The current rents, which took effect at the start of 2025, represent an increase of 1% to 2% from 2024, said Tamir Luqman, a retired labor union organizer who has lived in the building for nearly 20 years. 

Luqman’s connections with South Berkeley — which once was a historic Black neighborhood — run deep. He was childhood friends with Tamra Hamilton, the late landlord, whom he described as a warm-hearted lover of reggae music and cats. When he moved into 2627 California, the two of them hosted birthday parties in the apartment’s driveway and often attended concerts in Oakland. 

Hamilton was raised in an apartment at 2627 California and lived there for much of her life, according to Luqman. She later inherited the property from her father, Thomas Hamilton, an African American man who had it built in the 1960s with the intention of renting it to people who otherwise couldn’t afford Bay Area housing costs. Her father had instructed her to “make [the building] pay for itself, but make this available,” according to Luqman, who worked as the building’s property manager in exchange for a discount on rent. 

“So Tamra lived that,” he said. 

BACLT plans to install a plaque to honor the Hamilton family’s legacy, Parent said. 

Will land trusts alleviate Berkeley’s housing crisis?

The land trust model has been gaining steam in Berkeley. 

In 2022, BACLT and McGee Avenue Baptist Church refurbished an eight-unit building in South Berkeley. Across town, BACLT bought a 13-unit North Berkeley apartment building, preserving it as affordable housing. 

That year, the Northern California Land Trust acquired an eight-unit apartment complex in West Berkeley, tapping funds from the city’s Small Sites program. The Northern California Land Trust in 2023 announced plans to turn its longtime South Berkeley headquarters into a 7-story co-op affordable housing development.

With BACLT’s recent acquisition of 2627 California, it was able to “preserve existing families in their existing homes in their existing neighborhood” at $400,000 per unit — significantly cheaper than the cost required to build a single unit of affordable housing in the Bay Area, Parent said. A study by the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority and Enterprise Community Partners found that constructing one unit of affordable housing in the region typically costs more than $800,000. 

It’s the preserving of existing affordable housing stock and allowing them to grow and [have] ownership options, which helps with the racial wealth gap.

Muhammad Alameldin, UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation

Community land trusts are one just tool to ease the housing crisis, according to Muhammad Alameldin, a policy associate at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation. 

“It’s the preserving of existing affordable housing stock and allowing them to grow and [have] ownership options, which helps with the racial wealth gap,” he said. “It’s a shame it’s not more common, and it’s due to the financial environment that we have within the United States and also the legal environment.” 

And before the rise of condominiums in the U.S., co-op systems were a popular way for people to achieve shared homeownership, especially in places like New York, Alameldin said. Today, they’re relatively rare, with just 614,000 units nationally, 25,000 of which are in the Western U.S., according to a recent study of homeownership rates by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

California’s homeownership rates are the second lowest in the country at 43.5% of people between the ages of 25 to 75 (behind only Washington, D.C.), according to a report by the Terner Center. Over the last 40 years, homeownership rates for Black Americans between the ages of 35 to 45 have decreased by nearly 50%, the report found. As of 2023, Berkeley’s homeownership rates were 43.3%, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. An average home in Berkeley sells for over $1.3 million, Zillow estimates.

The decline boils down to a land-use issue, Alameldin said. Most of California’s residential lands are zoned for single-family zones — which he described as the “most extravagant” use of land resources. To address this, Alameldin said California needs to increase homeownership opportunities, such as by building more condos, creating more tenants-in-common units — a type of co-ownership — and expanding community land trusts, which can turn rental properties into affordable ownership opportunities.