The Fitzgerald neighborhood, on the northwest side of Detroit, runs roughly between McNichols Road and Puritan Avenue, and between Livernois and Greenfield. It is twelve blocks by four blocks. In 2014 it had, by the city's count, one hundred and thirteen vacant houses and three hundred and twenty-six vacant lots.

On a Saturday in May, on the corner of Pinehurst and Margareta, a woman named Devona Hightower was painting the porch railing of a 1924 bungalow that had stood empty for nine years before she bought it in 2021.

"The land under it is not mine," she said, dipping her brush. "The house is mine. The land belongs to the trust."

The trust is the Fitzgerald Community Land Trust, founded in 2019 as part of a redevelopment partnership between the city of Detroit, a nonprofit called The Platform, and a coalition of neighborhood residents organized as the Fitzgerald Neighborhood Council.

Its model is simple in concept and uncommon in American cities. The trust holds the land in perpetuity. Residents own the houses on top of the land, and lease the land from the trust on a ninety-nine-year renewable lease for a nominal fee, typically twenty-five dollars a month.

When a homeowner sells, they may only sell to a buyer approved by the trust, and they may only capture a limited share of any appreciation. The point, as the trust's executive director, Marcus Reaves, explained, is to prevent the kind of speculative price growth that displaces longtime residents.

"We are not against value going up," Reaves said. "We are against value being extracted."

The trust now holds title to one hundred and ninety properties: ninety-six houses, eighty-three vacant lots that have been turned into gardens or pocket parks, and eleven larger parcels that are being assembled for future cooperative housing.

Devona Hightower grew up in Fitzgerald. She left for college, lived in Atlanta for fourteen years, and came back in 2020 when her mother got sick. Her mother died in 2022. Devona stayed.

"I was paying twelve hundred a month for a one-bedroom in Atlanta," she said. "Here I bought the house for forty-eight thousand. The mortgage is three hundred and ninety. The land lease is twenty-five."

She paused with her brush.

"My mother would not have believed it."

The houses in Fitzgerald are mostly small, mostly brick, mostly built between 1915 and 1930 for workers at the auto plants that ringed the city. By the 1950s the neighborhood was about eighty percent Black, the result of the city's redlined housing patterns and the great migration.

By 2010, after decades of disinvestment, foreclosures, and the long collapse of the auto industry, Fitzgerald had lost more than half its population. Houses were stripped, burned, abandoned, demolished. The city, which had taken title to thousands of properties through tax foreclosure, owned a patchwork of the land.

The land trust was made possible, in part, by the city's willingness to transfer that patchwork. Between 2019 and 2024, the Detroit Land Bank Authority transferred one hundred and forty-two parcels to the trust at a nominal price.

Three blocks east of Devona's house, on a cleared lot at the corner of Stoepel and Margareta, a man named Gerald Hooks was running a small farm. He grows collards, kale, tomatoes, peppers, and, on a half-acre patch behind a wooden fence, sunflowers for cut flowers.

Gerald is sixty-seven. He lived in Fitzgerald from 1968 to 1991 and moved to Southfield for thirty years before returning in 2022 to help run what the trust calls the Stoepel Garden.

"I left because the neighborhood went bad," he said. "I came back because it is going good. I am not sure how to feel about that, to be honest."

The question that hangs over Fitzgerald, and over every neighborhood-revitalization effort in Detroit, is whether the work of stabilization is also the work of displacement. New investment brings new residents. New residents bring new property taxes, new businesses, new pressures on rent.

The land trust is, in some sense, a bet that ownership of the land can hold those pressures off. So far, in Fitzgerald, the bet appears to be holding. According to a 2025 report by the University of Michigan's Poverty Solutions program, the median household income in the neighborhood rose from twenty-six thousand dollars in 2018 to thirty-four thousand in 2024, but the racial composition stayed within four percentage points of its 2018 baseline.

Marcus Reaves, the executive director, is cautious about reading too much into this.

"Five years is not long," he said. "Twenty years is long. Fifty years is long. We have to be here in fifty years."

The trust's office is a converted house on Pinehurst, two blocks from Devona's. Its staff is six people. Its annual budget is about one point one million dollars, funded by a mix of foundation grants, city contributions, and a small revenue stream from the ground leases.

On the wall of the office is a map of the twelve blocks. Each property is marked with a small colored pin. Green for trust-owned and occupied. Yellow for trust-owned and vacant. Red for not yet acquired. There are still, on the map, more red pins than Reaves would like.

"We will not get every property," he said. "We do not need every property. We need enough."

Devona finished the porch railing in the late afternoon. She had used a deep blue paint, almost navy. Her neighbor across the street, a man named Calvin who has lived on Pinehurst since 1979, came over to inspect it.

"It is a strong color," he said.

"My mother liked blue," Devona said.

Calvin nodded slowly. He had known her mother for forty-one years. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at the porch and then up at the second-floor windows and then back at the porch.

"It looks good," he said. "It looks like a house people live in."