Prince Edward Learning Centre hosted “lean-in” sessions on land trusts and affordable housing, in partnership with Thrive PEC. This was part of a series of public events taking a closer look at building community wealth through land trusts, community bonds and community benefit agreements.

On January 30th, 2023 Prince Edward County welcomed Joshua Barndt from the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust to give a presentation at the Wellington District Community Centre to share their experience with the community land trust model as a potential way to address affordable housing solutions.

Dominque Jones, the Executive Director of The County Foundation introduced and welcomed Josh to give a presentation to the community in the PEC Affordable Housing Series, held at the Wellington District Community Centre.

Joshua Barndt is a Community Land Trust specialist, and has acted as the Executive Director for the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust since 2015.

Parkdale’s Neighbourhood Land Trust is a community organization that removes land from the speculative real estate market and stewards it in a community ownership model. The land trust currently stewards 84 properties with a total of 205 units of permanently affordable housing in downtown Tororoto.

Barndt is also a founding board member of the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts.

Transcript from Joshua Barndt’s Presentation:

Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust

Thank you for having me today. We’re passionate about the community land trust model, it’s created a great impact in our neighbourhood so we hope our experience can help others.

I’m the Executive Director of the Neighbourhood Land Trust which is the charitable arm of the Parkdale Land Trust. We’re a membership based community controlled organization. As mentioned, we acquire, own and steward land specifically for housing and other relevant community benefits and we are very lucky to be stewarding 84 properties in downtown Toronto, and 205 affordable rental units, which is a real honour and we are very excited by that. And all those units are permanently affordable through our model.

I’m going to share about the context we’re working in because context is important when we’re talking about Community Land Trusts.

We started our focus in South Parkdale, which is a neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. South Parkdale was historically known as one of the last remaining working class communities until recently.

We have:

• 34% of people who are living low income
• 32% of residents are recent immigrants
• Around 49% of seniors in the community are living alone
• And 42% of family households are lone parent households

Those are important demographics to think about who we are and what our needs are.

Something that brings us all together, most of all together, is that 90% of us are renters.

So as you can imagine, as the real estate market changes, we have a common experience of dealing with that challenge as an ongoing thing.

So the primary experience of rising land values and gentrification has been one of a struggle around trying to maintain our housing.

And often, people are being dispossessed of their housing in the process of gentrification.

It may be obvious to everyone today but when we started our work in 2015 it wasn’t, but gentrification is not just about buildings getting nicer, because we do what our buildings to get nicer, we have a lot of old buildings that need improvements, derelict or old commercial properties that need to be improved, but what we’re really concerned about really are the people, businesses and services that get pushed out in the process. Gentrification is a process of pushing lower income people and land uses out for higher income people and higher profit land uses. When we think about what challenges we are facing, we think about that a lot.

When property values go up, higher profit land uses displace lower profit land uses. What are those lower profit land uses? In our community, it’s affordable housing. A rental that is more affordable, is the first thing to go. Really important community spaces are at risk too. We had our community legal clinic displaced recently. They support tenants to maintain their housing and they themselves are dealing with eviction. And then also alternative economy projects, like our co-op. Our co-op has struggled to maintain their tenancies in buildings they don’t own.

Because as the land value goes up, commercial tenants can pay more, and that is often what the landlord will prefer.

That process is concerning because we lose residents who are important to us. Many of whom are encountering homelessness, we’ve got a big homelessness problem in Toronto, but also community equity is lost.

In Community land trusts work, we think a lot about community equity. What is that? We all pay taxes, the municipality invests in community infrastructure, that infrastructure increases the value of the land, that is community equity, that’s public equity, that’s important. Also as renters, we all pay rent, that rent pays off that mortgage. When that property sells and that owner takes that value as profit, theyre extracting that community equity as profit. One of the things we contribute to collectively. As a good neighbour, we make the place livable. AThat’s part of the value of that land that’s being held.

Also many of you here are also volunteers, so there’s the sweat equity over decades, maybe generations, and that equity is lost.

Sometimes we actually invest directly in housing, maybe we work with the municipality to create a certain tax abatement for a certain type of housing, or you subsidize it and sever it, or in some cases, particularly in our neighbourhood, we’re seeing that over time where we don’t have a model that holds the land in community ownership or nonprofit ownership, that we’re actually loosing the investment over time when properties sell.

We think this is really about land, and there’s a land solution, luckily: Community Land Trusts.

Nat did a wonderful introduction to Community Land Trust work in Canada, thank you for that Nat.

Something I wanted to reference from there that is important to us. From our vision, the CLT has a focus on serving low and moderate income people. We don’t just provide land to anyone, we target that use of the land and access to that land for people who are income eligible.

This is our community, we have a community governance structure, but everything we do is an opportunity to bring people together, to work together, towards some common goals.

This is our board, just before COVID. Our board is made up of people who work on our land, so tennants, they have a direct interest in our land. It’s made up also of community members who do not live or work on our land, but live in the area. They don’t have a direct interest in the land, but they know something about the needs of the community, and have a stronger interest in making sure the organization can expand it’s work. We also have representatives from local organizations, because as Nat said, we own the land but we actually don’t operate the properties, we have great partners that do that, so we want to make sure they are represented on our board and in our decisions.

We focus for our organizational representatives on organizations that serve low and moderate income people. They represent an expertise about a certain need that we might not know about. And we think that through what we call the ‘tripartite governance’, the three different interest groups at the table for all the divisions, they each have different interests and we all hope that together we can make the best decisions.

Our organization started back in 2014 as just an idea. People came together concerned about gentrification and displacement, learned it was about land, learned about the Community Land Trust model, and the first thing we did was execute consultations, just like this. The first people who came to present were grad students sharing about research being done in the U.S. and were sharing models of ‘this is what you can do’.

So we all came together, eventually realizing let’s do this, we cannot wait any longer, we’re losing housing everyday, and so they created an interim board. When you create a board out of nowhere it is not democratic, but we accepted that limitation, we had to start somewhere. Seven local organizations, each identified one person as a representative, who sat on that initial board and we made a commitment to work towards that democratic process. We gave ourselves some time.

We also identified a trustee organization. A trustee organization already has staff, already has that administrative office and capacity to provide some administrative support and access funds in a good way because that organization is trusted. You know you’re not going to get money from the city and in a couple of years it disappears.

Those were the central components: a group of interested organizations coming together, each having financial representatives on the initial board and a trustee organization in the community.

Then we spend two years, which you don’t have to spend but there weren’t any CLTs in our area, so we spent a lot of time in that next phase, creating an infrastructure for the organization, creating a community based governance model, and then researching our community, what were the housing needs that we could have an impact on.

And then we thought real estate is complicated so we vetted a pilot project before we tried to do something big. We spent some time doing pilots with our partners, and funded by our municipality, then we evaluated them, to make sure if we understood if they worked or not, and since then we’ve been in a growth phase.

In 2020 we went from an urban agriculture centre, 1 site, to 2023, to 8 buildings with 25 units of housing. For that jump, I’ll explain the context. The point is, it is important to start small, to make sure you get it right, and then you want to start moving. And you want to move with the municipality, at the pace of the municipality, they’re not going to throw money into a new initiative, you’ve got to prove you can do it well, and then you both start working together.

Acquisitions – our first property intentionally was a simple property, a vacant plot of land, that was land locked, didn’t have any servicing, was being used informally for community agriculture, it was a private owner, we purchased it below market, and we decided to maintain its use as urban agriculture, because that was of interest to our community members. The space was leased to a social service provider, the programs that are operated there are focused on equity seeking residents, refugees, etc. who are renters who do not have access to the land to grow food, but have the skills or interest in growing organic food for their own use. The programs are focused around that, as well as some social enterprises that relate to food.

We used this as a test site, to show everyone what the precedent is. We wanted to actually plan around the needs of a specific equity seeking demographic, we wanted to bring some of the people who are going through here onto our board so they are part of decision making as core members, and we wanted to show that we can actually purchase land.

It seems simple, just some vacant land for growing food, but it was extremely powerful in our evolution. We think this was the moment we pivoted to success.

Next, we acquired a 15 unit rental building, which had been historically operated by a private owner as a pretty affordable rental. While it was privately owned, it was for sale, and we were worried that the tenants would be kicked out if an investor bought the building and converted it to a higher cost rental, so we were able to buy that property.

I want to tell you a little bit about that journey that led us here, because this is what we do. In 2015 when we just got started there was a mass eviction, 27 tenants got kicked out with basically no notice of what we call a rooming house, it’s where someone rents a room but they share bathroom, kitchen, etc. We heard from other rooming house tenants that this was happening everywhere, but we didn’t know how big the problem was, or how the Land Trust could help.

We knew that rooming houses were important. People in transition were living in them, people transitioning out of homelessness, other people living in them just as affordable rentals, might have lived there for 20 years, it was the housing that made sense for them, it was good for them. Some were socially owned, but most were private.

We went out and counted every building in the neighbourhood. We went to every single building in the neighbourhood, and identified all the rooming houses, and we figured there would be around 90, and there were 198. So that was the first thing, usually, no offence to municipalities, they don’t actually know what exists when it comes to specific submarkets. And if you’re trying to think about how to respond, you want to get your own information. We found out that there were 2700 units, most still affordable. In the past 10 years, we had lost 28 properties that had been converted to higher cost rentals by investor groups, and 350 local people lost their housing in that process.

We also identified 59 tenanted properties that we felt were at a high level of risk, and we needed the ability to act quickly if we wanted those buildings to still be affordable.

In the process of trying to understand and develop political will and community buy-in for this type of activity, we had to start naming the problem, so we were able to name that the real estate boom was leading to the upscaling of rooming houses. It wasn’t that the real estate were disappearing, it was that back in the day, there were local landowners who could make enough money to live just by renting their rooms affordably. They’re old, they’re retiring, they’re selling their property, and the new investors who are buying the property today have no interest in serving the local residents through affordable rental. They want to rent them as short-term rentals, they want to renovate them quickly, throw a coat of paint up and triple the rent, they see them really just as investment properties.

We knew that there was a problem, and actually, we had a solution.

We’re going to be a good successor to these old landlords, they did a good job for a long time, we think we can do a better job, and we certainly can do a better job than these investment groups. So we want to buy these buildings from the old landlords before they get scooped up by the investors.

So this was the first time we did it, the municipality funded this as a Rooming House Acquisition Pilot Project. Our councillor was supportive of this effort, couldn’t convince the whole council of this project so said, we’ll do a pilot, so they created a pilot, gave us $1.5M to buy the building, we renovated it immediately just to make sure there was some improvement to the units, some quality, and now we have 15 affordable rental units with supports. We work with the local supportive housing unit that operates the building. They leased the property from us for 49 years. They are required to keep the rents low and maintain support services to residents.

Some economics – the tenants, on their lease, it says 80% of average market rate, whatever that is at the moment, when they move in. Most tenants, when they move in, can’t afford that. So when they move in, to make the rents affordable, what we can deeply affordable for residents, we use rental supplements, which will pay the difference between what the tenant can pay as 30% of their income, and the rent that we need to operate the building and keep people safe over time.

One type of rental supplement is GIS income, but we do use other supplements when it makes sense. In supportive housing, sometimes there are Ministry supplements that come from the Ministry of Health. It’s really important to think about that component of the project, because a building in this market, wherever your market is at, is going to be expensive, both for buy and build, or improve, but also to operate, and you are really probably going to need near to an average market rent in revenue to operate, so you are going to need rental subsidy to make it more affordable for the people who are going to live there.

So what is the win? The win is that in community ownership, we are creating a benefit, housing made affordable today, and in the future. And also, we’re ensuring that that community equity that I talked about earlier is preserved.

In the long term, that community equity is held in the land trust, and can be recycled through refinancing and other mechanisms can be used to support future affordable housing. So rather than the profit being pulled out, it’s being held, being recycled and being reinvested out into the community.

This is an important note, because our system has a lot of leaks. The public invests a lot into affordable housing, and other things like infrastructure that support housing development. We put a lot of time into these efforts and unfortunately we don’t have solid buckets to capture that community equity.

John David, one of the grandfathers of the Community Land Trust movement in the US, He says, ‘You’ll never find enough money to deal with the housing crisis, it’s so significant, and we’ll never build enough housing. We will never see the waters rise, until we can care as much about the tickle out, as much as the trickle down.’

We need to close those holes in the bucket and we think that the Community Land Trust can play a major role in that.

Our second building was a 36 unit building next to the first one which was good for operational efficiencies, but also was big, because 36 units is a lot. We bought this one in 2021, the city didn’t have any more money to invest in our projects yet, they weren’t convinced we were the long term solution, we had one success but we hadn’t convinced them we could create a long-term fund program.

So we went and found nine institutional investors, community foundations, we asked them would you lend us some money to buy some land that’s for sale and they said yes, so we raised $8M from that. We bought the building, and we spent 3 years seeking funding from the government. We said we bought this, the foundations were generous to support us to get it out of the market, you need to invest in this project so we can pay them back, and they did. We used impact investment, working with institutional investors, as a way to purchase our second property.

Since then, the city, from the lessons from our experience with the pilot, and this, have created a new housing program in Toronto which they call MURA, Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition program, and it’s an ongoing funding program, wherever you are in the city, providing funding to nonprofits to buy rental buildings to remove them from the market and convert them to permanently affordable housing.

Now this type of thing can be done by communities around Toronto, based on our experience. So we no longer need impact investment in the way we needed it initially, and the government has actually created a long term solution.

And finally, the last thing that got us to grow a lot is that the city of Toronto has a Housing Corporation called Toronto Community Housing, and it owns 66,000 units of housing, and it has a big challenge operating and maintaining those buildings, it’s a lot to handle. Recently, a decision was made by the city that that corporation would focus on large scale rental, and some of it’s smaller properties that it had acquired, through tax liens, through different eras, smaller housing and smaller rental buildings, would be moved to the nonprofit sector.

This decision was made partly because of our operational challenges at our public housing authority, but also because there was a tendency that when we got a conservative council, the council would look at these smaller buildings as a way to get some quick revenue. At different moments in Toronto’s history, we’ve seen houses be sold in little bunches, and then the tenants get organized and fight back, and it stops. And then it happens again. And so on. So there was a solution, that instead of leaving these houses vulnerable for the city to sell off, it would be important to move them into community organizations that had a long term commitment to affordability.

So we received through a competitive process 81 properties from the public housing authority with the expectation that we maintain those as permanently affordable rental housing. We have various contracts with the city around that, but it’s an honour. These are primarily single family homes, with 3 to 5 bedrooms, front yard, backyard, in downtown Toronto, in residential streets, and they are available to people to rent geared to income. These homes provide a very unique opportunity to residents who are lower income households, which is becoming very rare in Toronto.

Here is our distribution of types of buildings, here’s some rental buildings, stacked row houses, row houses, semi-detached and detached. A diversity of housing. Those homes are operated by the YWCA Toronto, we target these houses towards women-led households and gender diverse individuals.

Now that we have a portfolio, we’re starting to think, ‘We spend a lot of money’. At first we thought, our main thing is housing. And then we realized we’re spending a lot of money on operations, renovations, cleaning, everything, to maintain our buildings, and that’s actually opportunity itself. 

We can actually start to make very critical decisions about how we spend money to make sure we’re supporting local businesses, supporting equity seeking businesses, supporting other community development opportunities, improving our buildings in a sustainable way, and so we’ve developed a plan around that which basically is our social procurement and sustainability action framework.

The thing I want to end on is that certainly with the community interest, you’ve got to start somewhere, but then you’ll discover there’s more and more benefits as time goes on. If you have control of the land and the housing, then you can make dynamic decisions on how to put that to use for your community.

Thanks so much for listening, and for having me.