Changemaker: Aaron Miripol

Aaron Miripol serves as the President and CEO of Urban Land Conservancy (ULC), a nonprofit organization focused on acquiring, developing, and preserving real estate and physical assets to support the needs of underserved communities across Denver and the Front Range. He spent the formative years of his childhood living in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago.

“Although I can’t say I fully understood it at the time, when I lived on the south side of Chicago as a kid, I knew something about the community was different,” he recalled. “It was a neighborhood in transition. We were renters. It had been a Jewish neighborhood in the 1960s, and it was now a predominantly African American community less than a decade later. In school, I learned about redlining and blockbusting, and realized these factors shaped the neighborhood I grew up in.”

In the early 1990s, shortly after graduating college, Aaron worked as a tenant organizer in Chicago, advocating for residents at properties owned by slumlords who skirted the law and provided substandard living conditions. The organizing efforts sought to hold lawbreaking landlords accountable and worked to transfer ownership away from them. This is when Aaron was first introduced to the concept of community land trusts (CLTs), a model of land ownership where a nonprofit holds and stewards land on behalf of a community to promote affordable housing and community development. The land trust is governed by a board of community members.

“I was working with a tenant organizing group, and we were trying to collaborate with another nonprofit housing provider to partner with them on a multifamily CLT on the north side of Chicago,” Aaron explained. “As an organizing group, we were trying to figure out a way to shift from being reactive to proactive in providing affordable housing. We were ultimately not successful in that effort, but that was my first education in CLTs.”

From Chicago, Aaron moved to Baltimore where he oversaw two community development nonprofits working in urban neighborhoods. The communities where he worked had upwards of 30 percent vacant housing. Through his work in southwest Baltimore, he gained experience with financing and purchasing properties along with redeveloping and managing assets for affordable rental housing and homeownership opportunities. In 1998, Aaron relocated to Colorado to serve as the Executive Director of Thistle Community Housing.

“One of the main reasons I was attracted to Thistle was a new 57-home community in North Boulder they were starting to develop called Buena Vista. Thistle was using the community land trust model to ensure long term affordability,” Aaron explained. “Going forward, we were involved in establishing several additional community land trusts including the Mapleton Mobile Home Park preservation in Boulder and the new construction of Blue Vista in Longmont. CLTs became a core part of our work.”

Following nine years at Thistle, Aaron was hired as the first employee of the Urban Land Conservancy in 2007, which was established to address community needs in urban areas. This included affordable housing, child care, education, and job creation and focused specifically on neighborhoods with significant incidences of poverty as well as transit-oriented development (TOD) sites.

One of ULC’s first major undertakings involved a partnership with Enterprise Community Partners, the City and County of Denver, and CHFA to establish the first affordable housing TOD acquisition funds in the nation, facilitating strategic acquisition and creation of affordable housing in major transit corridors. ULC successfully deployed more than $15 million to preserve and create nearly 1,000 affordable homes through the TOD fund, and it served as a national model of success that influenced the creation of similar funds in Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago.

Starting in 2018 and continuing through today, ULC’s investments have been deployed through the $75 million Metro Denver Impact Facility (MDIF), a revolving credit agreement supported through local partners including FirstBank, Colorado Division of Housing, CHFA, Colorado Health Foundation, Gates Family Foundation, Colorado Trust, and Gary Community Ventures.

ULC’s largest acquisition to date supported by MDIF is the Mosaic Community Campus located on the former site of Johnson and Wales University in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood. “Cris White and Jaime Gomez were critical to advancing MDIF in its early days,” said Aaron. “CHFA was also able to provide us with a bridge loan for the Mosaic acquisition to ensure we closed on time.”

The Mosaic development includes the repurposing of buildings for K-12 education and workforce development through a range culinary programs led by nonprofits. It also includes the conversion of former dormitories to 154 affordable apartments across four buildings in a CLT with ULC. Since its inception, MDIF has supported the acquisition of real estate for community benefit at more than a dozen sites throughout the Metro Denver region, often leveraging a land trust model and long-term ground leases to ensure that properties serve the needs of the community for years to come.

“Community Land Trusts have been a passion of mine for more than 30 years,” said Aaron. “Getting to continually find ways to creatively finance and work with partners like CHFA in those innovative affordable real estate investments—that’s what keeps me inspired in the work and keeps me going. We look forward to continuing to leverage this model to support Coloradans for many years to come.”