Center for Community Investment
Devin Culbertson is Vice President of Innovative Finance at Grounded Solutions, a national nonprofit network of community land trusts, municipal programs, and organizations that advance long-term affordable housing solutions. Culbertson, who was a Fulcrum Fellow at CCI, is in charge of Grounded Solutions’ new Homes for the Future Initiative, which will purchase single-family homes in select cities to ultimately become part of community land trusts, allowing marginalized families to build wealth through homeownership.
Can you tell me about Homes for the Future? I know it’s designed to help Grounded Solutions purchase homes that can be placed in shared equity portfolios in different parts of the country.
Homes for the Future is a way to build up communities by expanding housing affordability and, therefore, helping families build generational wealth. To achieve this, we focus on using impact capital to invest in the single-family rental market, which was built for Wall Street investment and is extractive of communities by nature.
I understand your plans for the fund changed. Tell me more.
We were focused on acquiring homes in Atlanta one at a time, with the intent to portfolio them up and hold them. And then we got a call saying, “Hey, there’s this portfolio of homes in Minneapolis.” An owner was selling their entire portfolio, wanted to do it quickly, and wanted an entity that could buy them all—and was willing to do it at a discount. In total it was a little over 350 units, and the portion that we bought into, with several other mission investors, is 283 single-family homes. Some of the homes are vacant and some are occupied. It’s a pretty unique deal. And so, that’s actually our first investment, together with partners. But we didn’t let go of everything in Atlanta. We anticipate closing our first round of capital this summer and starting acquisitions there.
