This story was co-published with Fresnoland, a nonprofit newsroom that exists to make policy public – by, for, and with all residents of the central San Joaquin Valley.
It was Ashley Mireles-Guerrero’s dream to open a bookstore in the Tower District, the neighborhood where she lives in Fresno, California. That dream came true in July, when her bookstore, Judging By The Cover, moved in as the first commercial tenant of South Tower Community Land Trust.
Mireles-Guerrero and her husband, Carlos, started out doing pop-up book sales back in 2023. They had both previously worked in publishing; Mireles-Guerrero started out as a warehouse worker, but had moved up the ladder to vice president of marketing and public relations. She and Carlos shared a frustration that bookstores didn’t give enough shelf space to authors who were people of color, queer, self-published, or working with indie publishing houses.
They believed there was a market for those authors in Fresno — especially in the Tower District, home to the city’s annual pride parade and festival. They found a solid customer base through their pop-up stores at neighborhood events. But when the couple looked into renting a Tower District storefront, either rents were too high or long-vacant spaces needed more work than a startup indie bookstore could afford. They eventually opened their first brick-and-mortar location in Fresno’s Chinatown in 2024.
Now, they’ve found a new home in a building owned by the South Tower Community Land Trust — its first commercial acquisition, purchased in December 2025 with donations of as little as $5. The land trust isn’t your typical commercial landlord: Mireles-Guerrero doesn’t have to worry about having to move the business because of high rent or being neglected by some distant, faceless commercial real estate investor. After renovations are complete, the land trust’s offices will be in the very same building. Mireles-Guerrero even joined the land trust’s board in January.
“The whole values around our business are anti-capitalist in nature,” Mireles-Guerrero says. “I’m not trying to own real estate, I’m not trying to become an Amazon — nothing that we’re doing is meant to scale to the moon. I think if you’re a small business who is trying to become the next Starbucks, you’re probably not going to like working with a land trust, but if you are someone who already is community-focused, interested in mutual aid and solidarity economics, it’s a natural fit.”
Born on Broadway
South Tower Community Land Trust was born at the intersection of Broadway and Elizabeth Street — just a few blocks from Judging By The Cover’s new location. Back in 2017, the city decommissioned and demolished a former police substation at the southeast corner of Broadway and Elizabeth.
Architect Kiel Lopez-Schmidt, who grew up around the block, learned of the city’s plans to rezone the property as residential and hand it over to a private developer for construction of a market-rate apartment complex.
Lopez-Schmidt got together with a few friends and started knocking on every door within a two-block radius, asking neighbors what they would like to see on the corner lot. Nearly everyone said the same thing: They wanted a park. The data was on their side. The city of Fresno has a goal for each neighborhood to have at least three acres of park space per 1,000 residents, but the Tower District only had 0.36 acres per 1,000 residents.
Lopez-Schmidt started facilitating design discussions with the community. The park design itself was completed pro-bono by Robert Boro, a third-generation Tower District resident with an office two blocks from Broadway and Elizabeth. But the future of the lot was still very much in the air until 2019, when the state of California reformed its Surplus Land Act, creating a new requirement for local governments to prioritize affordable housing, park space, or new school facilities when considering the possibility of selling or leasing public land that isn’t currently in use. With that change, it became all but certain the lot would become a park.
All that was left was the question of how to pay for it. In 2018, Fresno voters passed the Measure P ballot initiative, creating a three-eighth cent local sales tax to fund parks, recreation, and the arts — estimated to generate $60 million a year. A lawsuit kept that sales tax from being collected until 2021. Finally, with $2.7 million in funding from Measure P, construction on the new park at Broadway and Elizabeth broke ground in September 2024. Dubbed Broadway Parque, it opened in July 2025.
South Tower Community Land Trust formed in 2022 to build on the momentum generated around Broadway Parque, tapping into that same community organizing ethos and energy to shape the rest of the neighborhood. Lopez-Schmidt became the founding executive director. As a community land trust, community members would always have a say in decisions about what to create or build, and any affordable housing or affordable commercial space it created would be shielded from the ups and downs of conventional private ownership.
What is a community land trust?
With an estimated 300 to 450 such trusts across America, community land trusts (CLTs) are an increasingly popular model for creating and preserving local ownership and long-term housing affordability.
CLTs are locally-based nonprofit corporations that acquire properties in their service area, then sell the buildings to low- or moderate-income homebuyers through a renwable ground lease. The nonprofit retains the deed to the underlying land, which is leased to homeowners through a renewable ground lease.
This lease is usually 99 years, in contrast to other shared equity or inclusionary housing models that have 20- or 30-year limits. Nonprofits also embed provisions in the lease to ensure these homes remain affordable to income-qualified households even if the homeowner decides to sell and move on, which restricts the profit a homeowner can make. Read more.
Through its community organizing, South Tower Community Land Trust continues to influence development over lots it doesn’t own. Last fall, after three years of listening sessions, meetings, hearings, online surveys, documents reviewed, and letters exchanged, Fresno City Council approved a new plan for the Tower District. The plan calls for even more green space and fresh food access in the neighborhood and adds protection for existing homes from the further expansion of food processing facilities in the neighborhood — all changes that South Tower Community Land Trust had been calling for the city to make.
Community ownership, beyond housing
The modern community land trust movement started with Black farmers in the rural south creating a community land trust, called New Communities, Inc., to acquire and protect farmland during the civil rights era. Since then, community land trusts have mostly been taken up as a tool for low-income residents to preserve or develop housing they can actually afford. Most of the 225 or so community land trusts across the country today focus on housing.
South Tower does have permanently-affordable housing in its portfolio. Using the typical community land trust model, it acquires land with the intention of keeping the ownership of the land permanently within the trust itself. Then it sells only the home on top of the land to a homeowner. Taking the land out of the equation lowers the purchase price, and the sale terms also restrict how much the homeowner can sell for later, which allows for some family wealth building while still ensuring that the home remains affordable to subsequent buyers.
South Tower Community Land Trust sold its first home last November and has several more in the pipeline, including up to seven tiny homes slated for construction on a half-acre vacant lot that will be shared with an urban farm.
“We’re in a mixed-use neighborhood,” Lopez-Schmidt says. “From the start, we knew that we weren’t just going to do housing. We were thinking about third spaces, community spaces, community-serving commercial, and mixed-use developments eventually.”
With its first commercial acquisition, South Tower joins a few other community land trusts across the country that have actively sought out commercial or mixed-use properties, including Champlain Housing Trust in Vermont, Rondo Community Land Trust and Partnership in Property Commercial Land Trust in the Twin Cities, and Brooklyn’s East New York Community Land Trust (which made its first commercial acquisition this year).
Denver’s Tierra Colectiva Community Land Trust broke ground last year on its first multi-million dollar mixed-use project. Boston’s Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative acquired a former bank building in 2017, and it just broke ground on a project to add new housing and revitalize the community and commercial space on that property.
Not too far from Fresno, Oakland’s OakCLT also got into the commercial game with the acquisition of one mixed-used property in 2018 and another in 2019. Executive director Steve King says while there are many dedicated, established subsidy programs for nonprofits to acquire or develop residential properties, there are few such programs for nonprofits to acquire commercial properties.
The need is there — both of OakCLT’s commercial acquisitions involved existing commercial tenants at risk of being displaced due to real estate speculation. But the public subsidy programs to address those needs are not there. For the most part, King says, community land trusts seeking to acquire commercial properties have to make those projects pencil out the same way as any for-profit developer, based on whatever rental or other income they generate from the property and whatever cash they can raise through individual donations or private investors.
“Just cracking that nut, depending on the context, can be more challenging,” King says.
Back in 2024, South Tower Community Land Trust was still without a home of its own, but it was on the way to building its portfolio as well as its small but growing team. While on a staff retreat, team members agreed it was time to secure an office space. Lopez-Schmidt carved out a piece of the next year’s budget for either securing a lease or making a down payment. When it came up for discussion, the choice was obvious.
“The whole mission behind our organization is community ownership,” Lopez-Schmidt says. “So why would we pay rent to a private owner?”
“Keep Tower colorful!” reads a mural alongside the new bookstore location. (Photo courtesy Judging by the Cover)
Full circle moments
With the turn of the new year, the search for a commercial property began. In January 2025, the listing for 617-619 North Fulton Street was one of the first that caught Lopez-Schmidt’s eye. It was a small, 2,300 square-foot single-story building with big front windows and two storefronts. It was also set back a bit from the sidewalk, leaving some open patio space for possible outdoor programming.
Discussions with funders started out informally, just circulating the trust’s commercial acquisition plans among individual donors as well as local foundations and potential lenders, gauging their interest. Lopez-Schmidt had previous experience working at two CDFIs — community development financial institutions — that were based in or active in Fresno. So while he knew that these specialized lenders would be more willing to work with a newer entity that had a funky mission and a model rooted in community organizing, he also knew that they would need at least three months — more time than conventional lenders — to evaluate a deal.
Luckily, the trust had the luxury of time. The Tower District was actually the target of two pilot programs last year meant to eliminate storefront vacancies, but neither had much effect. Owners of Tower District storefront properties seem content to sit on vacant spaces even with a threat of fines.
“The state of commercial real estate in our area is not super strong,” Lopez-Schmidt says. “There were vacant buildings as well as non-vacant buildings coming up for sale, but they weren’t moving too fast, so that we had a little bit of ability to be patient through that.”
By May, discussions with lenders started getting more concrete. As a relatively new entity with hardly any cash flow or cash reserves, how much debt would South Tower Community Land Trust qualify for? How much space did the trust itself really need? What kinds of tenants could they attract based on the specific location and characteristics of each property?
The South Tower Community Land Trust team walked through five potential commercial properties to acquire in the neighborhood. Some needed more work. Some were occupied, others were vacant. A larger building has its advantages, but it would come with the additional pressure of a bigger mortgage and finding more tenants to help share the cost of that mortgage. It helped to have a board member who was also a realtor; in addition to community members and land trust occupants, community land trust boards usually also include a few professionals with experience in key areas like real estate, finance, and architecture.
The property at 617-619 North Fulton found its way to the top of the list. It was still partly-vacant, which meant that the trust would be filling up some underutilized space but also that plumbing and electricity were at least functional. Most importantly, the owner was willing to give South Tower Community Land Trust three-months to close on the financing for the sale. They made their offer in August.
Judging By The Cover quickly committed as a tenant. Mireles-Guerrero first connected with South Tower Community Land trust a few years ago, when the trust was looking for a bookstore partner as part of the Queer Housing Summit, a national convening that the trust puts on every year in Fresno — the next one is later this month.
Last year, she told Lopez-Schmidt that the bookstore was outgrowing its space in Chinatown, particularly when it came to author talks and other programming. With the new Tower District space, the bookstore has the same amount of sales floor square footage, and Mireles-Guerrero and her husband are paying the same amount in rent, but she’s excited that the front and back patio spaces will allow for bigger and more frequent events.
“It definitely gives us a lot more room for collaboration,” says Mireles-Guerrero, who lives just three blocks from the new location. “We’re working with the trust on grants to support workshops and bring reading groups to the community. It really expands our capacity in a way we wouldn’t have been able to. This allows us to exist in a community where folks want a bookstore and makes sense for us financially.”
Without South Tower Community Land Trust, she says, it likely would have taken them at least five years to find a storefront in their own neighborhood.
The land trust’s acquisition closed in December, about a month past the original deadline.
“That was a challenge trying to keep the owner from pulling out while trying to meet all the requirements of the lender and their slow moving process,” Lopez-Schmidt says. “It benefited us that there were no other buyers. We got it for below the listing price.”
Including the $295,000 sale price, the total cost for South Tower Community Land Trust to acquire and remodel their first commercial property was $477,000, of which $350,000 came as a loan from Community Vision — one of the CDFIs where Lopez-Schmidt previously worked. The remaining $127,000 came from a combination of small grants from private foundations, a large bank motivated by the Community Reinvestment Act, and individual donations as small as $5.
What is the Community Reinvestment Act?
The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 is a federal anti-redlining statute that says banks have “a continuing and affirmative obligation” to meet the credit needs of the communities where they do business, consistent with “safe and sound operation of such institutions.”
It gives regulators the authority, for example, to deny bank applications to open or close branches, or to acquire or merge with another bank, if regulators believe the bank is not meeting those obligations.
Check out Oscar Perry Abello’s previous reporting, listen to our 2024 podcast episode, or watch our 2023 webinar on the CRA and recent attempts to overhaul it.
It was a full-circle moment for Lopez-Schmidt. Right next door to the trust’s new commercial acquisition is a workforce housing apartment complex developed as a public-private partnership with the Fresno Housing Authority. In his prior life as an architect, Lopez-Schmidt designed the complex, built in classic art-deco style.
“That was the other part of the appeal of this one,” Lopez-Schmidt says. “Being next to a Fresno Housing Authority property allows us to deepen our relationship with them. We’re in conversation around helping do some community design with their residents on redesigning the landscape in the back of the property.”
This article is part of The Bottom Line, a series exploring scalable solutions for problems related to affordability, inclusive economic growth and access to capital. Click here to subscribe to our Bottom Line newsletter.
Oscar Perry Abello is Next City's senior economic justice correspondent and author of The Banks We Deserve: Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy (Island Press). He also writes Next City's free economic justice newsletter, The Bottom Line.
Since 2011, Oscar has covered community development finance, impact investing, economic development, housing and more for media outlets such as Shelterforce, Impact Alpha, Yes! Magazine, City & State New York, The Philadelphia Inquirer, B Magazine and Fast Company. Oscar is a child of immigrants descended from the former colonial subjects of the Spanish and U.S. imperial regimes in the Philippines. He was born in New York City and raised in the inner-ring suburbs of Philadelphia. Reach Oscar anytime at oscar@nextcity.org or follow him on your favorite social media platform at @oscarthinks.
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