Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are a largely “uncharted” vehicle with the potential to retain much needed affordable housing, and finance future sustainable and locally guided development, in Metro Vancouver.

Metro Vancouver is in a housing crisis. For years, we’ve seen double-digit increases in home prices, rapid rises in the cost of renting, and persistently low vacancy rates. The need for new homes and new ideas has never been greater. With a growing consensus that in recent years the private and public sectors have failed to provide appropriate and adequate housing, new and impactful ideas are necessary.

One promising option to bridge this gap between private and public housing options is the use of community land trusts (CLTs) as an alternative form of land governance and housing development. While CLTs in other parts of the world have proven to be a practical form of “third sector housing” between from traditional private and public sector housing options,they are a relatively “uncharted” model in Canada that is not well understood or broadly used. A community land trust (CLT) is a non-profit corporation created to acquire and hold land over the long-term for the benefit of a community and to provide secure affordable access to land and housing. It operates within a given geographic area and is a flexible entity that usually serves those with low and moderate incomes.

The community land trust model is flexible and adaptable to a range of applications. It can provide affordable housing in perpetuity for multiple target groups along the continuum of housing and has been successfully used both locally and globally.The recent success of the Co-operative Housing Federation of BC in establishing new housing land trusts in the last several years has demonstrated locally how the implementation of land trusts can be undertaken successfully and how a CLT can attract publicly owned land and investors. As these initial experiences have demonstrated, the CLT model beneficial for all parties involved, including the municipality, community, non-profit organizations and investors, and should be considered a valuable tool to ease Metro Vancouver’s housing affordability crisis.

Here are the slides from a presentation I made at the 2018 UBC Social Enterprise Conference on March 10, 2018. The theme of the conference was “Shifting Gears: Drive The Change,” inspiring delegates to dream up their own creative ideas and solutions to current societal dilemmas. My presentation focused on community land trusts (CLTs).