Community Land Trusts, Land Leases & Shared Equity Affordable Home Ownership — a New Report
This report on Community Land Trusts, land leases & shared equity approaches to creating affordable rural housing was written by Gordon Borgstrom, Executive Director of the BC Rural Centre. The report is based on research completed by Borgstrom, as well as consultants retained by the BC Rural Centre to work on the project.
This report is one of several documents created as part of the Community Land Trusts & Rural Development Project created and managed by SIBAC/BC Rural Centre. The other reports and documents created as part of this project are available on our website’s Housing & CLTs page.
The BC Rural Centre gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Real Estate Foundation of BC as a funding partner in this project.
Background
The current focus for most government and non-profit housing organizations is on providing subsidized rental housing for the homeless and low income households. While this prioritization of the most-at-need is certainly understandable, several housing needs studies have also identified that many moderate income households ($42,000 to $60,000/year) are priced out of homeownership in their communities.
A recent report of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy noted that house prices across Canada have increased at an average rate of 2.1 times that of household incomes between 2000 and 20151. A similar trend is seen in many southern interior BC communities.
Recognizing that affordable homeownership is an increasing challenge in many southern interior communities, the BC Rural Centre designed and managed a research project to examine the Community Land Trust and shared-equity homeownership model and its potential application in BC. In funding partnership with the Real Estate Foundation of BC, the research project had four major components:
— Research to further quantify housing affordability issues and challenges in the southern interior of BC;
— Research to examine successful rural Community Land Trusts & housing organizations using a shared-equity homeownership model;
— Research on the financial and legal viability of implementing a CLT, land lease and shared-equity homeownership model in BC; and
— Extension activities to share the results of the research with non-profit housing organizations in the southern interior.
The resultant report summarizes the major findings and conclusions from the project.
