Turning houses into homes: Community land trusts offer a fix to Canada’s housing crisis

Source: ForeignAffairs4

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Alexandra Flynn, Associate Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, University of British Columbia

Imagine if every time a hospital was built, it came with an expiry date. Twenty-five years later, it would be sold to the highest bidder and patients would be told to find care elsewhere.

This is unthinkable in health care, yet this is precisely how we treat affordable housing in Canada. Government programs provide funding for the construction of affordable housing, but without long-term commitments to ensure those same housing units remain affordable.

As the federal government puts the finishing touches on planning its new housing programs, we must ensure that affordable housing stays affordable for generations.

Governments pour billions into new housing programs, but the homes that are built aren’t required to remain affordable over the long term, meaning they often slip back into the speculative market after just a few decades.

Government programs subsidize the capital costs of housing construction, with rent affordability guaranteed for a limited period (usually 10-20 years). A recent study found that Canada lost 10 affordable housing units for every new one built over a decade.

The implication is that land is a tradeable asset as governments forget it’s also the foundation for homes, communities and stability. If governments are serious about solving the housing crisis, they must change that.

Canada has done it before. In the 1970s and ’80s, governments invested heavily in co-operative housing, creating tens of thousands of permanently affordable homes that continue to serve communities today. Those investments prove what’s possible when land and housing are treated as long-term public goods rather than short-term commodities.

Holding land in perpetuity

Community land trusts (CLTs) are the next generation of that vision. They extend the principle of permanence to a wider range of housing types, neighbourhoods and community uses, ensuring that affordability and stability are not just won but protected for generations.

A new report by my UBC colleague, Kuni Kamizaki, entitled A Case for Community Land Trusts in Canada: Promising Community Practices and Public Policy Options, shows how CLTs can reframe the housing conversation in creating a long-term, affordable housing stock. It’s not simply about how many homes we build, but who controls the land beneath them.

CLTs are membership-based, non-profit organizations that acquire and hold land in perpetuity for community benefit. People then purchase long-term leases in individual units.

This means that the land is removed from speculative markets, stewarded democratically and the housing is locked in as affordable, often for 99 years or more. Unlike situations where properties are sold and affordability disappears after 10 to 25 years, CLTs preserve it permanently.

This is not a distant dream. Kamizaki identifies roughly 45 CLTs operating or forming across Canada, more than 60 per cent of them launched in the last five years. They range from the Community Land Trust Foundation of BC to Toronto’s Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust, each committed to collective ownership, community governance and significant affordability.

Meeting local needs

CLTs flip the switch on the usual policy logic. Too often, publicly owned land is sold to private developers, representing — as Kamizaki puts it — “a long-term loss of public good and a lost opportunity to build non-market housing with deep affordability.”

Once sold, the land is gone, along with the chance to secure permanent affordability. CLTs keep that land in community hands, using it to meet local needs rather than feed speculative demand.

The benefits go beyond economics. CLTs can advance reconciliation and racial justice by challenging the real estate practices that have displaced racialized communities for decades. This treats land as a relationship rather than a commodity, an understanding rooted in stewardship, responsibility and belonging. In other words: turning housing into homes.

Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley Society shows this potential in action. Once home to a thriving Black community, the neighbourhood was demolished in the 1970s in the name of urban renewal. The organization is now working to reclaim that land through a CLT, rebuilding a Black cultural hub grounded in long-term stewardship and land-back principles. This is housing justice intertwined with cultural restoration.

But CLTs cannot expand on good will alone. The National Housing Strategy Act recognizes housing as a human right, yet Canadian policies still treat it as a market commodity first and a necessity second.

Market-based “solutions” inevitably recreate the same conditions — speculation, gentrification, displacement — that produced the crisis.

How to advance CLTs

Kamizaki’s report outlines several steps governments can take to make CLTs a central part of Canada’s housing strategy, including the following:

Prioritize permanent affordability over short-term targets;
Support CLTs led by racialized and marginalized communities as acts of reparation;
Transfer public land into community hands;
Create legal frameworks tailored to CLTs;
Provide stable funding and technical support through a national CLT hub.

These are structural commitments that address the core questions: Who owns land? Who decides how it’s used? Who benefits from public investment?

CLTs answer these questions by matching the permanence of the right to housing with the permanence of land stewardship. They take the volatility of the market out of the equation and put democratic decision-making into the hands of the people who live in and care for their communities.

Many studies reinforce the conclusion that CLTs deliver lasting affordability, protect against displacement, and strengthen community ties. The real question is whether Canada has the political will to embrace them.

The housing crisis is urgent, and so is the opportunity. We can keep funding market Band-aids that expire in a generation, or we can take land off the speculative market, put it in community hands and make houses into homes. For good.

Alexandra Flynn receives funding from SSHRC and CMHC.

– ref. Turning houses into homes: Community land trusts offer a fix to Canada’s housing crisis – https://theconversation.com/turning-houses-into-homes-community-land-trusts-offer-a-fix-to-canadas-housing-crisis-264757