Santa Ana resident Ana Urzua was on a tour of urban development projects in Los Angeles when she stumbled on a novel idea — using a land trust to grow small businesses.

A community land trust, or CLT, is a legal option for nonprofits to pool resources and lease or buy land for affordable housing, parks, urban microfarms, and marketplaces for small businesses.

Things clicked for Urzua when she visited Mercado La Paloma, a congested marketplace along the Figueroa corridor in South Los Angeles. She figured a similar concept would work in Santa Ana. “We were inspired.”

In 2016, Thrive Santa Ana was born, a land trust that incubates businesses in a tiny enclave of Santa Ana’s Casa Bonita neighborhood, at the intersection of West Walnut Street and South Daisy Avenue.

CLTs typically lease land from the government and develop affordable housing that is tenant-owned. It’s a way of getting affordable housing into the hands of poor people.

In Santa Ana, the CLT is emphasizing the cultural heritage of its Hispanic community.

“There’s art, there’s culture and there’s history,” Urzua said of her organization’s project built on a vacant lot of dirt and rubble left behind when the former Orange County Mission Center was razed in 2011. Four years ago, her group agreed to lease the land from the city for $12 yearly.

Urzua’s vision for the land is nearly realized.

The small businesses on the lot — called La Colmena, which means “beehive” in Spanish — are beginning to take shape. Shipping containers have doors and windows cut out of their metal hulls, and colorful murals painted on their exterior walls. A tiny pavilion and “gathering space” with a stage for people to play music also is being built. A tiny farm features budding cilantro, collard greens, kale and spinach. Businesses are lined up for the container spaces.

Some of the businesses at La Colmena include La Milpa Cafe, a tiny shop that will offer coffee and pastries; Duugich Art, where local weaver and artisan Don Gelacio Mendez plans to sell wool rugs, bags and other art pieces; the Santa Ana Local Food System, also known as SALSA, a food hub where residents in the community can buy locally grown food on a subscription basis: Careshare OC, a nanny-owned child care service; Saboryarte, a Mexican cuisine catering co-op, and AZ Construction Group.

Urzua, who is board president of Thrive Santa Ana, also is the founder and executive director of Cooperación Santa Ana, a business development program that offers training, coaching and incubation to low-income residents and families in the city. (It’s helping with the technical assistance and incubation of the businesses in La Colmena).

Thrive Santa Ana is negotiating with the city to buy the land, with the remaining balance of its state-funded bankroll going to pay for construction and provide worker training programs on how to run a business.

We asked Urzua about her work in Santa Ana to fight gentrification and why the community land trust is the way to go. Her answers have been edited for clarity and length.

Q: How did Thrive Santa Ana end up with the West Walnut Street lot?

A: The city accumulated parcels of land — roughly 90 vacant lots — after two big corridor widening projects got underway in 2010 along South Bristol Street and Warner Boulevard.

The city basically bought up homes and businesses along both sides of the streets, and they had these remnant parcels. The communities in those areas got involved to make sure the land wasn’t sold off to developers at the highest bid.

The people neighboring these parcels wanted to be the ones who envisioned what got built on them. The land trust was a strategy for the community to develop the land.

Q: With the $3.8 million from the state, how do you plan to spend the money for development of the Walnut and Daisy property?

A: Early on in the pandemic, we estimated the cost to develop the land at $500,000. But the pandemic blew everything up. There’s been construction cost increases and delays, driving up costs to $1.2 million.

We’ve weathered the impacts of COVID-19. But there’s also the purchase offer to buy the land from the city, with the rest of the funding going toward technical assistance, incubation of the small businesses, coaching and support for business development for the cooperatives on the site.

Q: Is this the only parcel of land that Thrive Santa Ana is looking to add into its land trust?

A: At the moment, yes, but we are really eager to move toward housing projects. La Colmena is just one project.

The land trust has a person on staff now — Luis Sarmiento, program manager — and there’s a lot of activity around community members who are part of the land trust and who are identifying priorities and laying out the vision for what development could look like in Santa Ana.

Affordable housing has been one of our primary needs, and we’re looking at the land trust as part of a strategy to make it accessible in the community.

Q: How did you get the Walnut Street property?

A: The lot had been vacant for years. Thrive Santa Ana engaged the local neighborhood through surveys and community events to get input from the neighbors of the land, to determine what they’d like to see on the land. Through this engagement, we determined that many people in the neighborhood came either came from agricultural communities, or possessed a related skill set in agriculture. This is what led to the visioning of an urban farm on the empty lot, as well as all the businesses that will operate there.

Q: What are your concerns about gentrification in Santa Ana.

A: Downtown Santa Ana used to have a small merry-go-round that was removed (in 2011) along Fourth Street called the Fiesta Marketplace. The carousel drew Latino families to the shopping district. It was the economy of the working people of Santa Ana.

Downtown lost its Latin American identify when that happened. It was rebranded as East End Santa Ana, but it felt like an erasure of our community and history. The market was an emblematic symbol of Fiesta marketplace. This is why we created El Mercadito Carrusel, or “the little carousel market” in English, a food and craft festival (along Santiago Street), named after the merry-go-round in downtown.

We really feel like we are creating pathways for vendors and small businesses at La Colmena.