Community land trusts can keep housing cheap in the face of rising rents, say advocates and developers, but an Ottawa Council committee decided recently to keep its existing housing strategy, which prioritizes funding new construction over preserving affordable housing.

In a Nov. 20 vote, Ottawa Council’s planning and housing committee rejected a plan to use municipal funds to buy land to reserve for co-op and non-profit housing, reported CBC News. Defeated motions from Ottawa’s standing committees do not usually go forward to council for consideration, the rules of procedure state.

If the proposal had been approved, Ottawa would have followed Toronto’s 2023 Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition Program, which has successfully funded five non-profit corporations to turn private sector buildings into affordable co-operative housing.

“We see more and more households facing displacement and distress, and municipal contributions in this space could really make a difference,” Mike Bulthuis, executive director of the Ottawa Community Land Trust, told The Energy Mix.

New Construction, Housing Preservation Can Be Both/And

Under the defeated motion by Councillor Laine Johnson, half of the revenue from Ottawa’s vacant land tax would have gone towards an acquisitions fund to convert private rental stock to affordable non-profit and community land trust-owned housing.

The planning and housing committee rejected the acquisitions fund proposal after staff advised that provincial and federal housing funding sources require the city to meet ambitious construction targets, with thousands of new units in the works. Debbie Stewart, the city’s general manager of strategic initiatives, told CBC that Ottawa’s federal housing rules don’t allow for housing strategies besides new construction.

“What I’ve been disappointed with is the idea that we have to put new construction essentially in competition with acquisition,” Johnson told CBC after the vote.

In a financialized housing market, new housing steeply raises rents, said Bulthuis. For every new affordable unit that has been built in Ottawa for the past decade, 31 units with rents less than $1,000 per month have been lost to demolition or renoviction, a recent study by Carleton University professor Steve Pomeroy found.

To Bulthuis, cities may need to construct new housing supply, but they must also preserve the affordable housing they already have.

“Preservation and new supply strategies are complementary,” Bulthuis said. “It’s less effective to pursue one in the absence of the other.”

CLTs in Toronto

Toronto’s Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition Program (MURA) is a model for how cities can pursue both supply and preservation, said Bulthuis.

Before MURA, some Toronto residents were already looking to community land trusts (CLTs) as a solution to save their affordable housing units in the face of rising prices and renovictions.

After years of tenant organizing, the Kensington Market Community Land Trust bought a 12-unit building in 2021, funded by a National Housing Strategy (NHS) Demonstrations Initiative grant from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Now, long-term residents can live without the constant threat of unaffordable rent increases displacing them from their community.

MURA funding also allowed another CLT, the Parkdale Land Trust, to pay back its loan more quickly, enabling the land trust to look to acquire more buildings.

Federal Funding on the Table

The federal government recognized the value of land acquisitions for CLTs through the $1.5-billion Canada Rental Protection Fund announced in the 2024 budget. The details of the fund have not been released, but Bulthuis thinks Ottawa shouldn’t wait.

Ottawa and other cities could hit the ground running by researching proactively which neighbourhoods are most in need of CLT funding, how to determine building eligibility, and other processes.

“I worry that cities like Toronto or Montreal, which are much further along in having that kind of clarity, will have access to funding much quicker than Ottawa will,” he said.

Even if funding disappears under a new federal government, as Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has implied it might under Conservative leadership, CLTs plan to continue developing affordable housing using other funding models.

“The decision that the city made was disappointing. What I think we, as a land trust, are so encouraged by is the community’s response,” said Bulthuis.

By selling community bonds, the Ottawa CLT has already reached its goal of C$1.7 million to pay back loans for six units of affordable housing purchased in 2023, and it hopes to acquire more.

“Hopefully, governments will come onboard,” said Bulthuis. “In the meantime, I think there’s a lot of community momentum for this, which is really exciting.”