North Carolina’s community land trusts are working to raise the profile of their housing preservation model, which its members see as a vital tool in the struggle for affordable housing in a rapidly growing state.
Community land trusts keep housing permanently affordable by maintaining ownership of the land and selling the homes or buildings sitting on it to individuals or groups. The model removes the land cost from the purchase price, and the land trust controls resale values to ensure homes remain affordable to future generations.
Several of the state’s trusts have launched the North Carolina Community Land Trust Coalition to share best practices and resources to shape housing policy, and “increase government and philanthropic support” for the programs by educating lawmakers and the public.
Today, more than 300 Community Land Trusts operate across the country, including a dozen or more in North Carolina. Funding comes primarily through competitive processes for grants, loans and other sources at the federal, state and local levels.
Kimberly Sanchez (Photo: Community Home Trust)“The hardest thing to do is to find operational funding, especially for newer land trusts that are starting to be created,” said Kimberly Sanchez, executive director of the Community Home Trust in Chapel Hill. “You have to acquire land, which is not cheap and you have to hold it forever, so you have to have some level of consistent operational funding just to make sure you can keep the inventory that you have forever for the community.”
Sanchez has led the Chapel Hill-based Community Home Trust for six years. The nonprofit has been around for more than 30 years and is one of the oldest community land trusts in the state. It followed the Durham Community Land Trustees, Inc., which became the first in the state in 1987.
Collectively, the state’s community land trusts have created 394 homeownership units, 398 affordable rental units and have supported households with an average of 63% of area median income, the coalition reported.
Sanchez’s group and the Durham Community Land Trustees control hundreds of those properties, while newer community land trusts control just a few or sometimes a single property. The coalition expects 12 to 14 members, but noted that some are new and still forming and will be added to the coalition’s new website at a later date.
Sherry Taylor (Photo:Durham Community Land Trustees)Sherry Taylor, executive director of the Durham Community Land Trustees, said the coalition’s rise is timely, given the growing interest in community land trusts in North Carolina.
“We actually started meeting last year to come together and make sure that permanently affordable housing is at the top of mind, not just for individual areas of the state that we cover, but as a statewide initiative,” Taylor said.
Taylor noted the state law allows property tax exemptions for certain affordable housing when they’re controlled by qualifying nonprofits.
But, she added, there’s more to be done.
“We realized that attainable housing, especially home ownership, is something that is a growing need all across the state,” Taylor said. “We wanted to first inform lawmakers that this is a model that has worked all over the country and has worked in North Carolina and is still working to create attainable homeownership.”
Finding new ways for community land trusts to increase production of affordable housing would be the next step in the process, Taylor said.
“I’m not gonna list out all the ways that they [lawmakers] can possibly help this group, but I do think thinking through those things and getting in front of them will be the primary goals of our coalition,” Taylor said.
Last year, a study commissioned by NC REALTORS®, the NC Chamber and the NC Home Builders Association highlighted the extent of the housing crisis in the state. Researchers found North Carolina will need more than 764,000 rental and for-sale units over the next five years to meet demand across all 100 counties.
The NC Housing Coalition has found that 48% of state renters are cost burdened by rent payments and 19% of homeowners have trouble paying their mortgages. A family is considered cost-burdened if it spends more than 30% of income on housing.
Diverse models
North Carolina’s community land trusts operate differently from each other even though they share the same model, said Sanchez with the Community Home Trust in Chapel Hill. She says the model’s flexibility allows responsiveness to local needs.
“We focus on different things, the way that we’re funded is different, the way we interact with our community is different,” Sanchez said. “Durham and Chapel Hill are 10 minutes away from each other, but even just culturally, they’re totally different.”
A notable difference, Sanchez said, is that Durham focused on rentals early on while her organization focused on homeownership. Now, Durham has a growing stock of owner-occupied homes and Sanchez’s organization has entered the rental market.
Sanchez’s organization has nearly 300 properties in its portfolio. Many were acquired through Chapel Hill’s inclusionary housing policy. Under the policy, housing developers are “encouraged” to sell a few housing units to the community land trust.
“It’s that political will that has given us the opportunity to have almost 300 homes,” Sanchez said.
A startup in Watauga County
Over the summer, the relatively new Watauga Community Housing Trust celebrated the completion of its first home, a refurbished, one-bedroom house near downtown Boone that it sold to an adult with disabilities.
The volunteer-run and member-led nonprofit was created in response to skyrocketing housing costs in one of the state’s more expensive zip codes. Boone is a major tourist destination and home to Appalachian State University, both of which put pressure on housing costs.
Ben Loomis (Photo: Watauga Community Housing Trust)Ben Loomis, a Watauga land trust member, said the previous owner of the house contacted the then-startup about selling a lot and a rundown house at a good price.
“It was just sort of an opportunity that was too big to pass up, even though we at the time, we had really just gotten started,” Loomis said. “That was like early 2023 and we had no money in the bank.”
Loomis said the organization spent the next summer fundraising and raised enough money to purchase the property. Over the next two years, he said, the group took out a construction loan, continued to fundraise and “basically rebuilt it from the ground up, everything from the foundation to the roof.”
Affordable housing has become an even bigger issue in region in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Helene and the historic flooding that ensued, Loomis said. Thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged in Western North Carolina, including 140 housing units that were condemned in Boone due to flooding.
“That exacerbated all of the issues that we were focused on when Helene hit,” Loomis said.
The new coalition is an opportunity for established community land trusts and new ones like his to share expertise to advocate for a greater good, he said.
“We see the goal as to be able to provide resources to other new community land trusts as they start up, but also to work on a higher level and do lobbying and large-scale partnerships for material donations with building companies and universities that each individual and trust may not be able to do on its own,” Loomis said.
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