Community Land Trusts area simple enough concept: take land off the speculative market and hold it in community hands. But those three words – community, land and trust – are complicated. Join us for The CLT Files, the podcast where we dive deep and messy into the issues with people involved in the CLT movement. How do you define community? How do you acquire (stolen) land? Who can you trust? If you’re curious about the theory and practice of community land trusts, you’ll want to open the CLT files.
Join us for The CLT Files, a podcast where we dive deep and messy into issues confronting community land trusts in Canada and beyond.
Episode 1
In this episode, we discuss Canada’s new Federal Acquisition Fund: what it is in theory, what we need in practice, and the years of advocacy that got us to this announcement. Given the housing emergency, how do we effectively advocate for policies that allow us to acquire at-risk buildings and keep our neighbors housed?
With Joshua Barndt, Executive Director of the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust; Thom Armstrong, Chief Executive Officer at Co-operative Housing Federation of BC; Mike Bulthuis, Executive Director of the Ottawa Community Land Trust; and Shekara Grant, founder of the Weymouth Falls Community Land Trust and Program Manager, Community Housing Transformation Centre.
Notes:
In April 2024, the federal government announced a new fund to protect existing affordable units across Canada, providing $1 billion in loans and $470 million in contributions to non-profit organizations and other partners to acquire and protect affordable units across Canada.
Three additional acquisition programs are referenced in the podcast:
British Columbia’s $500 million Rental Protection Fund, which provides one-time capital grants to non-profits and co-ops so they can buy existing rental buildings; Toronto’s MURA (Multi-Unit Residential Acquisition) Program; and Nova Scotia’s Community Housing Acquisition Program, which provides low-interest mortgages for acquisition of existing housing.