The house sits on a quiet street across from a fire station. The gray stucco looks freshly painted and the front windows are framed by black shutters. Inside, hardwood floors gleam in the morning sun as Jackline Mukiibi, 25, shows off her home, the first home owned by anyone in her family.

Daughter Ava, 3, is away at day care, but her photos sit atop a shelf. Over by the stereo is evidence of a fledgling modeling career, a Target ad featuring the toddler.

It doesn't look like a house with a notorious past, but it is. Mukiibi's tidy home was part of the TJ Waconia real estate scam that washed through the North Side. Over a three-year period, developers Jonathan Helgason and Thomas Balko of TJ Waconia bought and resold houses for inflated prices to straw-buyer investors, triggering a foreclosure crisis that left many homeless and many homes abandoned. In April, Helgason and Balko were sentenced to eight and seven years in federal prison, respectively, for their crimes.

Mukiibi represents an effort to reclaim that part of the city, one house at a time. Hers is believed to be the first of the 141 homes from the scam to be sold.

Working through City of Lakes Community Land Trust and taking savvy advantage of several other programs that encourage home ownership, Mukiibi cobbled together a mortgage loan and down payment and moved from her tiny apartment in February.

Mukiibi paid $703 a month for her apartment. Now she lives in a three-bedroom, two-bath house with a finished basement, family room and a fenced yard for $728 per month.

Born in Uganda, Mukiibi came to the United States with her parents when she was 2 years old. "I dreamed of owning a house when I was a little girl," she said. But she got pregnant at 21, which seemed to limit her ability to buy in the near future. Mukiibi works for a nonprofit and goes to school full time at Metropolitan State University, where she is earning a degree in ethnic studies.

"I was just trying to get by," she said. "I was lucky to get a job when I was eight months pregnant. Until I bought this house, the most money I ever spent was on a laptop computer for school."

A neighbor told her about CLCLT and invited her to a picnic with the organization that day. The nonprofit, founded in 2001, is dedicated to keeping housing affordable. It does that by owning the land for the property, but selling the house to a buyer with a low income. The buyer then leases the land.

In Mukiibi's case, that means the agency's stake in the property of about $60,000 dropped her mortgage to about $97,000, making the house affordable. If she sells some day, she gets all the equity she has paid in; the agency gets 75 percent of any remaining profit to roll into other homes.

Jeff Washburne, executive director of CLCLT, said the group has helped 87 families, mostly single parents, buy homes. "They work and make good money, they just don't make quite enough to buy a home," he said.

Mukiibi also tapped an alphabet soup of other agencies for help in getting on her feet, including Family Assets for Independence in Minnesota, which gave her money management training and an incentive program to save, plus some matching grants from the city and neighborhood to make the down payment.

"I'm a very resourceful person, but it was hard finding all the money available to someone wanting to buy a house," she said. "It almost seems as if it's easier in Hennepin County if you don't have a job.

"But [CLCLT] made me feel empowered," she added. "You feel very independent, but they give you all the resources you need. They know how hard it is to buy your first house, and they don't look down on you."

Mukiibi said she gets irritated when she hears people complain about handouts. "I feel I've been blessed by non-profits," she said. Soon, she will graduate from college and begin to help others, as they helped her. In a way, she's already helping just by being here.

Roberta Englund, a neighborhood activist, said the North Side still has a long way to go to recoup the 200-300 homes lost during the foreclosures crisis, but "this looks like a winner," she said.

jtevlin@startribune.com • 612-673-1702