Housing nonprofit buys Durham apartment building, 2.3 acres of land for $8.7 million
.jpg "An aerial photo of a 48-unit apartment building and 2.28 acres of nearby land that have recently been sold to Durham Community Land Trustees for affordable housing. The property is located at 1600 Anderson Street in Durham, near the intersection with Chapel Hill Road in the Lakewood Community.")
A local nonprofit won a bidding war for a 48-unit apartment building — and 2.28 acres of adjacent land — in Durham’s highly sought-after Lakewood neighborhood.
Durham Community Land Trustees (DCLT), which seeks to preserve affordable housing, recently purchased Anderson Apartments at 1600 Anderson Street, near the intersection with Chapel Hill Road.
It also bought the next-door lot of mostly wooded land at 1650 Anderson Street. It’s around the corner from Duke Forest and less than three miles southwest of downtown Durham.
The total price tag: $8.7 million ($7.2 million for the building and $1.5 million for the land), DCLT said.
“It’s one of the largest deals we’ve ever done in one day,” said Sherry Taylor, the group’s executive director, in a video call. These types of opportunities don’t come up often amid Durham’s surging real estate market, she added.
“Durham is a different place than when we started. You could buy a lot for $20,000. Those days are over. There’s so much more competition.”
The seller, Concord St. LLC, had “multiple interested buyers” for the properties but chose to sell to DCLT so that the housing would remain affordable for both current and future tenants, said TradeMark Properties’ Kharmika Alston, who represented the seller.
“It’s rare for both the buyer and seller side to have aligned values on pricing that also have a societal benefit,” she said.
In Durham, 18% of homeowners — 13,520 households — have difficulty affording their homes, according to a recent report by the N.C. Housing Coalition. (Families that spend more than 30% of their annual or monthly income on housing are considered cost-burdened.)
Preserving Durham’s affordable housing
Since 1987, DLCT has developed affordable housing for low and moderate-income families. Funded through a mix of public and private sources, it develops and manages homes for sale and for rent in neighborhoods like Central Durham and West End.
Among its strategies is purchasing naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH) — a term used for unsubsidized rental housing, usually 20 years old or older, that is considered “relatively affordable” — like Anderson apartments.
The two-story building, built in 1968, includes one-, two-, and three-bedroom units. They’re all currently leased, ranging from $1,100 to $1,400 per month, Taylor said, and will remain available at market rate.
In the coming years, DCLT plans to develop 20 to 48 units on the adjacent land, most likely townhouses or condos, she said. They’ll be available for sale to households earning 80% or less of the area median income (AMI). That’s around $80,900 in 2024, city data shows.
The trust uses a shared equity model. Purchasers buy homes at or below market rate. But as part of the deal, the trust retains permanent ownership of the land. Homeowners lease the land at a nominal rate for a term of 99 years. They also pay reduced property taxes.
“We have opportunity to build new construction and expand home ownership that’s permanently affordable,” Taylor said.
Community land trusts, or CLTs, have been around as a successful model for affordable housing since the 1970s. They’ve gained renewed interest of late — in the Triangle and nationally — as mortgage rates and house prices have soared.
Durham’s real estate remains “very competitive.”
In ZIP code 27707, which includes Anderson apartments, the median sale price for a single-family home was $455,000 in September, up 13.9% since last year, according to the latest data from Redfin.
Homes receive three offers on average and sell in around 16 days.
