A still-forming housing group in Nelson is looking for land, and the help of some non-traditional partners.
The unnamed community land trust is still in the early stages of development, but Val Mayes of the Social Planning Action Network Nelson says the society would focus on acquiring spaces where low-cost housing could be built.
“The ideal is that by creating this entity you have a place where people can donate land, or if they don’t have land that’s appropriate to build affordable housing on, maybe people would donate or leave in their wills other land which could then be sold, and the money used to buy appropriate land,” she says.
Still to be determined is how the group would arrange for housing to be built on its land. Mayes says it could assemble its own coalition of builders, or approach another non-profit with the right experience.
Many of those groups, she adds, are also getting involved in the land trust planning process, which continues next week.
“Habitat for Humanity is coming to the meeting,” she says, “so that would be a logical partner to say, you guys have expertise putting together a build using volunteers, let’s talk. It totally depends on who’s at the table.”
Mayes says the group was inspired by the Vernon and District Community Land Trust, and hopes to draw on some of its best ideas.
“The group in Vernon, part of their success and why they were able to do what they did is their board included an accountant, a lawyer, a developer, somebody from law enforcement and someone from the nonprofit sector,” Mayes explains. “They had a whole lot of people who had connections.”
Though the group will look for members from those areas, it’s also keeping Nelson’s non-profit housing groups in the loop, to create an organization that isn’t in direct competition with them.
“If you create a whole new organization, and they start applying for funding for housing, that’s not really going to help all the other groups that have been applying for years,” Mayes says.
“That’ll just be competing. We don’t need this group to go to the Columbia Basin Trust.”