A Community Land Trust may be one strategy in the ongoing effort to provide affordable housing in a tight market.
Of course, it ought not be the only one.
Some Albemarle County residents have been investigating the possibility of starting a land trust here.
Only 200 such programs exist elsewhere - none in Virginia.
Under this concept, the trust - operating as a non-profit corporation - would sell housing at an affordable price to those who qualify.
Financial qualification, according to current thinking would be a family income of $39,900 to $53,200.
The trust would have a perpetual lease on the land.
Homeowners could resell their houses, but would have to sell back to the trust or to a private buyer at an affordable price.
The arrangement seeks to keep its housing at low cost by tackling a basic problem in markets such as Albemarle-Charlottesville’s.
By perpetually owning the land on which a home sits and pulling it from the housing market, the trust would ensure that the land would never be subject to rising prices based on scarcity and speculation.
Land for homebuilding is increasingly hard to come by. Scarcity alone drives up prices; but an added element is speculation, in which buyers with ready money enter the market with the intent to sell at a handsome profit in the future.
Such buyers can easily snap up real estate, while residents with lower incomes never have enough to get into the game.
The land trust mechanism would prevent buyers from making a maximum profit when they sell, but foregoing that future income might be an acceptable trade-off for them.
Many supports must be in place before the idea can work here.
Actually getting the trust up and running could take a while.
Meanwhile, existing affordable housing programs continue to deserve support.
Several non-profits already have carved out their niche here.
Alleviating the affordable housing shortage will continue to require a variety of strategies, of which the land trust would be only one.
One of Albemarle County’s strategies is to persuade developers to build affordable housing as part of their projects.
But at around $190,000, the general price of those units is still considered unaffordable by some.
Plus, the program has been criticized by many because the units need not remain at the “affordable” level but may jump to market prices on subsequent sales.
The ultimate affordable housing strategy would be for Albemarle - and to an extent Charlottesville - to make land more affordable and development less restrictive.
Especially in the county, government policies are considered by many as too limiting, and the red tape for development approval as too burdensome.
Land policies add to the cost of the land, and development restrictions add to the cost of building: The result, naturally, is higher housing costs.
A many-sided solution for affordable housing is clearly needed. That may include non-profits trusts - but it definitely demands wise government
