Vancouver's False Creek South once offered a progressive model for mixed-income housing. Now, a community land trust is helping sustain this legacy.Supplied
In 2021, the city of Vancouver proposed rebuilding Robyn Chan’s neighbourhood of False Creek South to triple the amount of housing there. The stout 60-year-old waterfront neighbourhood stands out from highrises that surround it – home to a mix of co-ops, social housing, private housing and seniors’ residences, built with the help of federal funding in what was then regarded as a model of progressive urban planning. The residents now sought to preserve its unique character while protecting it from skyrocketing housing costs and gentrification.
So, Ms. Chan and her neighbours turned to the idea of a community land trust, a mechanism that would give them more control and protect their mixed-income community from blunt-force private development.
The False Creek South residents managed to fight off the city’s plan three years ago and have been moving steadily towards making the land trust a reality. They incorporated it formally last year.
Community land trusts are a concept that has been around for over 50 years, fostered by people looking to protect communities – especially those with poorer and more vulnerable residents – from seeing their affordable housing lost to gentrification, speculation or massive densification plans. Typically, residents form a non-profit organization and acquire the land within an area, then form long-term lease agreements with renters living there. They agree to never sell the land for a profit, thus protecting neighbourhoods from the speculative housing market, while allowing the community to steward the land according to its specific needs.
“It’s a way to have more control and to expand non-profit housing,” said Ms. Chan, who has a masters’ in planning and is working with her False Creek South Neighbourhood Association to find a more community-centred way to increase affordable housing without just ceding to the current model many cities are using. That is: Give private developers permission to build much more than existing zoning allows in return for getting a few below-market apartments out of each project.
Ms. Chan and her neighbours are far from alone these days. As housing prices have escalated in almost every city across Canada, while federal and provincial governments’ willingness to support subsidized housing has stayed at modest levels, many community groups have turned to the idea of a community land trust.
It’s a concept that was first put into action in 1969 in one small town in Georgia, during the civil-rights movement, as a way of giving local Black residents a permanent and secure right to land.
This model’s popularity has increased noticeably in the last two decades, as more and more cities in many countries have been hit by astronomically escalating housing costs.
The number of community land trusts in Canada is now over 40 and climbing. The U.S. is home to about 225.
Here, they include Black groups in Nova Scotia, Toronto and Vancouver working on getting the rights to first parcels of land in historic Black neighbourhoods; Indigenous initiatives in both rural and urban areas of B.C., Alberta, and Ontario; housing groups in Quebec; homeless organizations in Calgary, and elsewhere in Vancouver; False Creek South; and the historically impoverished Downtown Eastside in Vancouver.
The trusts range from large organizations – like the one developed by the Co-operative Housing Federation of B.C. that now has 2,700 units in its trust portfolio and another 1,200 in the pipeline – to very small ones focused on a single neighbourhood where a small group of advocates is just starting to mobilize.
“The community land trust movement is extremely robust right now,” says Susannah Bunce, a professor at the University of Toronto who has studied the movement for years and is the project lead on a national research initiative. “It’s a response to the housing crisis that is even hitting small towns now. Community land trusts are a positive, aspirational response.”
Toronto has in particular seen a burst of new trusts, in neighbourhoods like Chinatown and Kensington Market, in part because, in 2021, the city set aside funding for this kind of development via the Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition program.
Trusts have also become more attractive as people looking for solutions felt other models weren’t working.
City efforts to create affordable housing often ignore community ideas about how to integrate new development in historic neighbourhoods. Non-profit housing, while offering subsidized options, also tends to be run by organizations not always attuned to local needs.
Added to that, governments aren’t providing anywhere near enough money to close the gap when it comes to shortages of modestly priced housing.
“I think a lot of people are excited because it offers a new type of community-controlled institution that can focus on local priorities,” said Joshua Barndt, the executive director of the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust in Toronto. That group now manages a portfolio of 86 properties, most of them rooming houses that the City transferred over to the group in 2022.
Mr. Barndt noted that even co-ops, often touted as a utopian solution to affordable housing, can end up focused on improving the building they have rather than looking at how to increase their housing stock because their boards are made up of existing residents who are wary of taking on new, risky ventures.
Land trusts are also slow when it comes to actually acquiring land and running their own housing projects, said Kevin Hooper, the director of affordable housing for United Way Maritimes. This is in part because of the work required to build up expertise and convince donors or various levels of government, along with banks, that they will be around for the long term to manage budgets and housing.
In Nova Scotia, the United Way has thrown itself into trying to shore up the community-land trust movement, a “craze that hit here slightly later than other places,” Mr. Hooper said.
Community land trusts, he says, have huge upsides, because they are “a community-building effort, not just a housing effort.”
But, he adds, many struggle at the beginning to develop capital resources, construction expertise and political negotiating skills.
“The downfall of trusts is that, at the local scale, you just don’t have the capacity or opportunity. It’s just inherently complex, ” he said.
The United Way is trying to overcome that with backing and research, he said.
“We’ve really been trying to nurture a network of land trusts.”