After spending 20 years at a small apartment building on Kirkwood Avenue, Lucie Huneault was afraid of what she would — or wouldn’t — find on Ottawa’s real estate market.
When the six-unit, red-brick building was put up on the market, its tenants were faced with a seemingly impossible task: finding new units with rent well below the average.
“I was afraid that I’d have to move or increase my rent,” said Huneault, who’s also been caring for the building in her role as super. “I’m OK with rent right now, but I only have the old pension check. That’s all I have.”
But the building wasn’t sold to a developer, renovated and rented at a much higher price; it was snatched up by the fledgling Ottawa Community Land Trust with a pledge to keep the building affordable — forever.
Now more than six months later the community-run group is poised to purchase a second property, this time in Vanier.
What is a Community Land Trust?
These non-profit trusts are “created by the community, trusted by the community, to hold land for community benefit,” explained Mike Bulthuis, the executive director of the Ottawa Community Land Trust.
Some trusts build new housing, but Ottawa’s version focuses on preserving what already exists.
“First and foremost, the existing tenants who are living in the building at the time of purchase [benefit],” said Bulthuis. “We invite them to stay. Our commitment is that their rents are protected.”
The goal is to avoid “renovictions,” where real estate is purchased primarily as an investment and buyers aim to maximize their returns.
That real estate trend has fed a renewed interest in the land trust model, said Susannah Bunce, an associate professor in the department of human geography at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.
Originally created in the 1960s as a way to support black land ownership, the model has proliferated throughout Canada since the 2010s, Bunce said, to combat the view of housing as an investment — rather than a human right.
“The land will be taken off the speculative market. It won’t be subject to any kind of increase in property value because there’s no focus on property gains or the idea of property speculation,” said Bunce.
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Responding to gentrification
In Toronto, many of the most prolific land trusts are focused on specific neighbourhoods that are at the front line of gentrification, a process where rising home and rental prices push people out of established communities.
Community leaders say the same is happening in Ottawa.
“It has a huge impact,” said the Lowertown Community Resource Centre’s Jolane Lauzon. “I think everywhere in Ottawa we see small homes or affordable housing being destroyed to build newer houses with less apartments available.”
Aggravating the issue is that many new buildings only have small units which can’t accommodate existing families, both in size and price.
It’s why Lauzon said the centre was excited by the opportunity to invest $100,000 from its reserves in the land trust rather than a traditional financial institution, allowing their money to “also give back to society.”
These sorts of investments are a key part of the trust’s financial model, which relies on “blending” capital from different sources.
The Kirkwood Avenue purchase required a municipal grant, ward funding and a sizable anonymous donation.
The trust has also launched “Housing Forever Bonds” aimed at individual investors and offering up to 4.5 per cent interest. The gambit has raised $900,000 since May, with a goal to raise another $240,000 by the end of next month to finance its purchase in Vanier and prepare for whatever comes next.
“Often, real estate timelines are so quick, so we don’t have time to do a fundraising campaign,” said Bulthuis.
What’s next?
Bulthuis said its offer on the Vanier property has just been accepted.
“It’s a 10-unit apartment building in the eastern part of downtown in the Vanier neighbourhood, where we know that there’s a lot of private rental housing,” he said. “And as that neighbourhood changes, we also want to make sure that the affordable housing that is there is retained.”
While some land trusts have reached the point of owning thousands of units, Bunce was quick to say that scaling up is not always the best option for an organization — even when provincial and federal leaders call for it.
“For governments, it’s seen as a way to download responsibility for affordable housing provisions to non-profit, non-governmental organizations as a way of offloading the responsibility of governments to provide affordable housing,” she said.
Among the biggest challenges for growing trusts are finding and securing land, and maintaining a complement of staff without sustained funding, she said.
No matter how much the Ottawa Community Land Trust may grow, Huneault would like everyone involved to know they’ve already made a difference.
“I’m happy they bought the building, because I know they’re gonna keep that low-income rent,” she said. “That’s gonna help the community, the people who need a place to live for cheap.”
