Affordable housing is a hot commodity — and a new Ottawa land trust wants to counter that
Taylor Blewett, Ottawa Citizen
Publishing date: Dec 08, 2021 • 41 minutes ago • 5 minute read
As the struggle to find and keep affordable housing has grown more acute, it’s no surprise to Dennis Carr that community land trusts are gaining momentum, including a new one in the nation’s capital that recently won federal funding.
To Carr, a social purpose real estate consultant, this modern wave of Canadian CLTs — non-profits that acquire and hold land and other housing assets for the benefit of a community –– are “part of a larger societal look at 30 years of neoliberalism.”
According to the authors of a 2020 book chapter on CLTs, nine of the 20 that were active in Canada at the time had been established in the preceding six years.
“Up until the early ’90s, Canada had a national housing program that was the envy of many other developed countries, and then … it ended, as did a lot of other social programs,” Carr said.
“And the neoliberal theory is that the market was best placed to take care of all of our problems. That obviously is not true, and it’s certainly very obvious with housing because we have this horrible affordable housing problem. And I think that the land trust movement is in part, a response to that.”
While a wholesale political-economic paradigm shift isn’t in their mandate — “we’re not trying to overthrow the government, we’re trying to do development differently,” board member Lisa Ker quips — the group of housing heavy-hitters behind the Ottawa Community Land Trust (OCLT) is working in pursuit of a goal that feels radically different in the overheated housing market of late: preserving and creating housing that stays affordable forever.
Born from a community steering committee, with early funding from the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada, Co-operative Housing Association of Eastern Ontario and the Community Housing Transformation Centre, OCLT was incorporated as a non-profit last January.
Earlier this month, it was among the 16 projects awarded a total of nearly $3.3 million by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation under the National Housing Strategy’s demonstrations initiative. From Ottawa to Whitehorse to Toronto’s Kensington Market, all were community land trusts and related projects — an area of “high potential impact,” according to the CMHC.
OCLT has been granted $250,000 over three years to set up a revolving loan fund to facilitate strategic property acquisition. The idea, said board member Steve Pomeroy, a housing policy consultant and researcher, is the acquisition of older, relatively affordable apartment buildings in the private market that could otherwise be identified as an “underperforming asset” and scooped up by an investor.
With a revolving loan fund — to be developed in partnership with the Ottawa Community Foundation and with the potential for philanthropic donations — the acquisition dollars wouldn’t just disappear into a single property purchase. Theoretically, they’d be replaced with long-term, low-rate financing from CMHC, with the money freed up to facilitate another acquisition, Pomeroy explained.
Meanwhile, a non-profit could be brought on to manage the property, rents could remain reasonable into the future and tenants could be selected with an eye towards need.
“The real estate market is just so incredibly commodified that the collateral damage in that process is lower income folks … not even just lower, but lower and middle-income folks that either can’t find affordable rentals (or) they can’t get into the home ownership market,” Pomeroy said. He sees the community land trust model, with the preservation of affordability at its heart, as an important counterbalance.
It’s more than a money matter, explained Ker, former executive director of supportive housing provider Ottawa Salus and currently deputy executive director of the Community Housing Transformation Centre.
“I am always at a loss when I talk to people about affordability and they can’t see basic, basic things like children who grow up poor, grow up with fewer advantages and more struggle ahead of them than children who grow up in middle-class environments,” Ker said. “If children have a quality home that is secure, that’s half the battle for many, many things.”
And it isn’t just in the private market where the long-term survival of affordable housing can face challenges.
Carr, a founding member of the OCLT board, sees opportunity for non-profits and co-ops leasing land from governments to instead deal with the land trust to “ensure that the affordability and the social benefits that come from that continue in perpetuity.”
One example? Land south of Albert Street across from LeBreton Flats, leased out decades ago, according to Pomeroy, as part of a federally-funded demonstration initiative.
Another land-trust possibility is presented by private developers, from whom the city can secure community benefits such as affordable housing in exchange for permission to build bigger. In Vancouver, where Carr worked for five years as the city’s assistant director of social infrastructure, the local land trust was a partner the city turned to in order to take on negotiated benefits.
While that could mean money in the Ottawa context, Carr said that ideally it would entail the building of units onsite, allowing for the benefit of “wholesale” prices.
At least one member of the development community already thinks the OCLT could be an excellent place to park a community benefit, in some form. An entrepreneur in the environmental and real estate sectors, Jeff Westeinde says doing so could check two boxes for developers: getting their project to market and contributing to the supply of affordable housing.
Westeinde, president of Zibi Canada and partner at Theia, one of two developers on the Zibi project along the Ottawa River, says he’s yet to meet a developer who doesn’t have their eye on affordability issues. You can’t help but notice the pressure on real estate in all forms, he explained.
“And it’s not good, like if you look at what happens to so many communities … There’s a follow-on effect, if you haven’t got affordable housing for, you know, teachers, nurses, firemen et cetera, et cetera — like, communities suffer for that. And then we over the long term, we as the property developers will suffer as well.”
While it’s a non-profit, Pomeroy thinks the land trust has to be revenue-generating to be effective, acquiring land or buildings and then collecting lease income from those occupying the building or building on that land to sustain the organization. With the asset base that comes with such acquisitions, a land trust gains creditworthiness it can take to the bank and use to secure financing for reinvestment in the sector — something existing non-profits and co-ops could benefit from, if they chose to move their title into the trust.
Today, 10 people from a variety of housing backgrounds populate OCLT’s board. With help from their new staff member, they’ll soon develop an action plan for the years to come. And the excitement about getting OCLT off the ground is significant, Ker said.
“There’s a lot of different players that are involved in this that I think will demonstrate to the city that when you come together from all different sectors, you can build something that is truly marvellous and that works for many, many people.”
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