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, Prince Edward County welcomed Nat Pace from the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts to give a virtual presentation on community land trust models as a potential way to address affordable housing solutions.

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

Nat Pace is a Montreal based housing strategist, advocate and community organizer. They are currently the National Network Coordinator for the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts where they are building a technical support assistance program for community land trusts across Canada. Previously, Nat worked with the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, building members capacity for the delivery of trauma-informed gender responsive housing programs and services for criminalized women and gender diverse people. They also served as an advisory circle member in the 2022 Pan-Canadian Voice on Women’s Housing Symposium. Nat’s housing work seeks to disrupt inequitable systems by mobilizing communities around visions of more just futures.

Transcript from Nat Pace’s Presentation:

A Community Land Trust for Prince Edward County?

Thank you, I’m super excited to be here. I wanted to come visit in person, but the weather got the best of us eh?

This presentation is: A Community Land Trust For Prince Edward County?

We’re not sure if it’s the direction to go, but I’ll share what I have to say and then you all will make your own decisions together.

I’m going to go through what the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts is, what the community land trust model is, and go through a few examples of what a community land trusts, discuss some of the factors for success you’ll want to have in place, and get into some questions to ask about whether this model is right for The County, and the first steps to pursue, potential funding opportunities and potential ways to gain access to more information if you’d like.

The Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts is a national network that connects together community land trusts across Canada. We facilitate a lot of knowledge sharing, capacity building, and activities. Right now I’m in in the process of developing a technical assistance program, which simply would allow groups across Canada to give them access to the tools and resources they need to do that more efficiently.

We’re very involved in building this movement around community land trusts across Canada through advocacy, outreach and community organization.

The community land trust model, it’s important to know, began in the 1960s in Georgia. It was developed by a community of black farmers who were seeing total inequity in access to land, so they devised a model where a nonprofit corporation would hold the land on behalf of the community members to provide access to that land at fair prices. This is it in a nutshell, there is quite a deep history we can dive into.

That model spread from more of an agricultural rural model and in the 80s entered into urban areas, areas that are experiencing a lot of gentrification, displacement and thighs related to urban renewal. It was a way for residents to have better control over their neighbourhoods and stay in the neighbourhoods where they’ve been living.

What the model is: there are a couple of main components of the model. First, there is the Community Land Trust Organization, usually through a membership based structure, people who are living within the geographic area, people who are living in homes that owned by the community land trust, and that allows for democratic control over the processes.

The basic model is a form of dual ownership where you’re separating ownership of the land from ownership of the structures on top of the land. For example, a home on a community land trust, if you’re purchasing that home, you’re purchasing just the home, the land will always stay within the community land trust. By that model, the land is effectively removed from the private market, it’s no longer switching hands.

Lastly, the last element is touching on how community control is essential to the model.

Something that is important to understanding the model is that what goes on the land dosen’t necessarily matter. The community land trust can be thought of more in the form of land tenure, than ownership. What goes on the land is really up to the community’s needs. It could be homes that people own enabling affordable home ownership, it could be family rentals, it could be agriculture, it could even be open space, it’s really depending on what the community wants the CLT to do.

How it provides affordable housing is by preventing the land from exchanging hands and preventing that sort of speculative investment into the land, it can ensure long term affordability.

Two main types of community land trusts in Canada, and I wanted to quickly touch on them, as based on the organization it can look quite different.

A community based land trust I think is more of what you folks would be considering, and this is in response to displacement and escalating housing costs. These are usually smaller in scale, at the neighbourhood level, at the regional level, and this is open membership to the community, residents are voting on the activities of the land trust.

The other type of land trust we see in Canada is a sector based community land trust, these have been initiated by organizations within the cooperative housing sector who use the land trust as a vehicle to gather and acquire more land. These tend to be larger in scale, and may not have that element of community control.

I wanted to touch on some community land trusts in smaller communities around Canada. These are all community based community land trusts.

The first is the Muskoka Community Land Trust, which is a nonprofit community land organization that acquires and stewards land primarily for the purpose of developing permanently affordable housing. They have the land trust, and they have partnered on a project called the Great Housing Project, an environmentally focused affordable housing project, focused on developing rental units on donated land. They’re in the process of getting this project started.

There’s Opportunity Villages Community Land Trust in Chattam, Ontario and they have a project called the Brickworks, where they have purchased a large tract of land and their idea is to build 30 smaller homes that will be sold for less than market value, and their going to be using a life-lease model.

There’s the North Hastings Community Trust, which is an anti-poverty community board in Bancroft. They have decided they are going to add a community land trust to their activities, a community land trust embedded within an organization. They’re looking at an acquisition based model where they intend to purchase existing rental housing and keep it in trust and keep it at an affordable rent. They have currently purchased one building made possible through private donations, and they’re in the process of making amendments so they can rent those units out, so they are getting started.

These three groups are all community based land trusts, as you can see they are all relying on that model of a nonprofit collectively holding land for community benefit. They are all founded each in a different way, whether they are focused on affordable ownership, affordable rentals, or what have you, and theyre all in the start-up phase.

I wanted to bring in something something more developed as well. There’s the Tatamagouche Community Land Trust in Nova Scotia, which is an 8 member organization, they have over 100 acres of agriculture land, multiple families have built houses on the land, and then a community agriculture organization has 99 year lease on some acres of the land where they grow various products. This is a group of people who collectively purchased this land because they wanted to have long term sustainable access to high quality agricultural land and they wanted to do that where the broader community would have a stake in its governance. This group is a little bit harder to find anything about online, but if you would like contact information I’d be more than happy to pass that along.

I also wanted to bring to mind Glassworks Village in Owen Sound, this is a group that has purchased a 50 acre parcel that was previously zoned as industrial reserve land but nothing ever came and nothing was done with the land so they got it in their hands and their goal is to develop this large site into a multi use living village including housing, affordable commerce, family agriculture.

What that would look like is that they have this large site, they’d partition it into different lots with organizations they saw within alignment with their goal. So for example, that would be an affordable housing partner, that could be a community agriculture organization.

The point is that Glassworks Village is the steward of the land, they’re not the one directly coordinating these activities, that would be their partners. They are also currently in the process of rezoning changes so as you can imagine that’s an obvious hurdle to get things off the ground but there is a lot of support for this project, current goals include 350 carbon neutral rental units so really great partnerships towards this project.

So those are some examples of Community Land Trusts in smaller communities, those are ones I thought you might be interested in. I know there’s a lot of agriculture that goes on in The County as well, so you can clearly see how this model doesn’t have to be focused on housing exclusively, can include agriculture and affordable commerce.

Specifically thinking of Glassworks, there’s a lot of similarities that Owen Sound is facing that is similar to Prince Edward County, especially related to tourism driving a lot of the skyrocketing housing prices and housing loss, and how that’s spilling over into the inability to retain seasonal employees.

Some factors for success you want to try to have in place if you’re going to go about building a community land trusts in your area:

START UP FUNDING: It’s always good to try and secure some startup funding. A lot of groups in this area are working with volunteer labour and that can get into hundreds of hours quite easily, running the risk of burnout or the project just collapsing, so it’s always great if you can get some money to hire support or a project manager.

ACCESS TO TECHNICAL EXPERTISE: There’s a lot of complicated technical legal aspects so at some point you’re going to need some technical expertise, whether you get that from a consultant, or whether you have a very expert board on hand. Other CLTs I know have had success working with law students and universities, so that’s always good too.

SUCCESSFUL NEARBY CLT: I think that successful CLTs nearby are always really good, they can act as a message for land trusts and have already educated your local government. Some of the examples I shared today weren’t too far off, most of them were in Ontario.

POLITICALLY-MOTIVATED MUNICIPALITY: It’s good to have a politically motivated municipality, which is great, I know the County does have this as a priority, they’re motivated to work on affordable housing so that’s good.

STRONG RELATIONSHIPS WITH COUNCIL: Strong relationships with your Council. A lot of CLTs were initiated with a council member on their board.

POSITIVE RELATIONSHIPS WITH HOUSING PROVIDERS: Beneficial relationships with your local housing providers. A community land trust may be seen as a competitor to an existing housing provider, but with the right strategy and position, you’ve got to be able to avoid duplication, identify synergies and find ways of working together. Ideally, you don’t want to do the same thing that your affordable housing corps are doing, you want to add something of use to the community.

LOCAL HOUSING ASSESSMENT: Lastly, it’s really important to have a good idea of what the needs are in the community in relation to housing and real estate. You don’t want to duplicate anybody’s work, you want to bring something that is really needed in the community. Completing a local housing assessment would be a crucial step.

 In conclusion, is a CLT right for Prince Edward County? I don’t know, I don’t have the answers.

Some of the questions I would ask would be:

• What are the gaps in the housing market?
• What are your goals?
• What is the entity that does it best?

Don’t go in asking: ‘Do we need a CLT?’
Go in asking: ‘What do we need? What is the model that’s going to work for us?

It might not be a community land trust that you folks would pursue. But there are strengths of the model: community governance, access to the land, can be a way of enabling affordable home ownership (it doesn’t have to be about home ownership but I find that’s something unique it brings to the table), and lastly its perpetual affordability. The housing that’s on a community land trust is not going to be sold off, it’s going to be affordable for the long term.

From the the Startup Community Land Trust Hub, it’s an American resource so some of the language doesn’t specifically translate to Canada, but they have a road map outlining some first steps you can do. The beginning phases of organizing a community land trust are all in organizing your community, understanding what the community wants, building coalitions and bringing a lot of people to the table.

There are funding opportunities for community land trusts in Canada. Some of the federal funders include the Community Housing Transformation Centre (CHMC), also a whole slate of foundations, social impact investors who are very interested in this model, community bonds, can feed into this model as well.

Having a strong municipal partnership is crucial, municipalities often will donate some start-up funds to get the ball rolling, or potentially land, and the municipality may be able to offer other things to level the playing field, waiving development fees for example.

Lastly, this is in the works but I wanted to bring it up, there’s a group in the works called Fairbnb Cooperative Canada. They’re trying to create a model right now that is like Airbnb but 50% of the revenue is redirected into a local community land trust and it only allows for units that have a primary homeowner – not an occasional resident who is renting their home – this is for people who are buying long term homes and converting part to a vacation home. I wanted to bring this example up because I know Prince Edward County sees a lot of seasonal tourists.

If you’d like to keep connected, we’re on social media and I encourage you to reach out there or on email. I’ve included some resources I think could be interesting on the history of CLTs in Canada, and some other startup resources to learn more about the model. Do note they are based in America, but slowly more and more resources are becoming available in Canada.

Thank you so much for having me.

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