The US civil rights movement of the 1960s spawned the first housing trust as a way to separate land ownership from housing and therefore create more affordability in perpetuity. A non-profit trust is able to keep a lid on land prices by keeping the land out of the market.
Since this beginning, the number of U.S. housing trusts has grown to more than 225 and the movement has spread to other countries. Canada saw its first housing trusts in 1993: on the Toronto Islands, where the trust saved a number of single-family homes from demolition, and here in BC with the Land Trust of the Co-operative Housing Federation of BC. More recently the CHFBC CLT has utilized parcels of City of Vancouver land to construct co-op and non-profit housing.
Housing trusts are always non-profit corporations focused on low-to-moderate income households. They are almost always defined by a geographic region and established by that community.
Some trusts concentrate on affordable ownership homes, others on rental or co-op housing. Some like the largest CHT, the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, VT, includes all three tenures. Champlain was established by Burlington’s City Council in 1984 as a vehicle for urban renewal projects. Its mandate is to support the people of Northwest Vermont strengthening “their communities through the development and stewardship of permanently affordable homes and related community assets.” Community assets can include parkland, daycares, financial counseling, renewable energy projects – the list goes on.
To achieve the housing affordability for which they were created, a typical CHT separates the market pricing of land from the value of the improvements. Each is owned by a different entity with the land being owned by the CHT and the housing by an individual, a co-op, or a non-profit housing organization. In the case of ownership housing, equity gain is limited by a formula developed by the CHT and is shared between the owner and the CHT. Besides affordability, a trust’s object is security of tenure.
MORE ON THE FALSE CREEK SOUTH CHT
Once RePlan identified CHTs as a model for the development of affordable housing, they applied for a grant from the Real Estate Foundation of BC to study and document the model and began exploring the idea of a community housing trust in FCS. This study culminated in an all-day workshop on CHTs at SFU in 2016 attended by 250 people from the Lower Mainland and further afield. Brenda Torpy, founder and, at that time CEO, of the Champlain Housing Trust, was the keynote speaker and offered much help and insight to RePlan both at the meeting and in private discussions. The project concluded with a Final Report to the Real Estate Foundation. After this, along with nudging the City towards lease renewal, RePlan continued to research CHTs worldwide to look at what we here in Vancouver could learn from how their trusts emerged from the community and how they operate.
More recently, with the assistance of a further grant from the Real Estate Foundation and BC Housing and in-kind help from CHFBC, RePlan explored creating a CHT in False Creek South. The FCSNA struck a Community Housing Trust Advisory Committee of local residents to assist with the work and to further explore how a trust might benefit the neighbourhood and how a trust might operate on city-owned land that would remain so. The committee interviewed a number of local stakeholders in the development of affordable housing as well as Tiffany Duzita, Executive Director of the CHFBC CLT. This work led to incorporating a FCS CHT in 2020, with the Neighbourhood Association as incorporating sponsor. The Board is currently concentrating on selecting the appropriate option for a first proposal to take to the City during the planning process. The project would be on undeveloped edge lands of FCS.