Blog

By Daniele Berman, CHT Marketing and Communications Manager

As a child, one of my favorite books was “The Little House” by Virginia Lee Burton. First published in 1942 and the recipient of the Caldecott Medal in 1943, the book tells the story of a little house on a hill in the country and what happens to her as a city grows up around her.

(Spoiler alert: she is forgotten and becomes sad and rundown, but ultimately, the great-great-granddaughter of her original builder recognizes her and moves her back out to her happy place in the country. Want to hear the story? Mr. Paulson will read it to you here. Take a story break!)

I’d like to think that all the many, many, MANY times my mother read me that book (thanks, Mom!) have something to do with why I do the work I do today. My original copy of the book, pictured above, was my mother’s original copy, and although the covers are falling off and the pages are yellowed, it’s a book my own children have treasured, too. And while there are many lessons to the story, one of the most important ones, I think, is about the value of a home and how it’s so much more than a just a house. I’d like to think that just maybe that book taught me a thing or two about home and is part of why I love to tell the stories of our CHT homeowners today.

So today I want to tell you a different story about a house. Well, the first part of the story, anyhow. Over the coming months, we’re going to be telling you about how one house becomes a Community Home Trust home. This particular house is in the new KB Home community of Bridgepoint – at least it will be there, eventually. Right now, that house lives in the imagination of the builders and architects and designers and planners – and in the dreams of a future first-time homeowner, too.

So how does a house become a CHT home?

In the case of Bridgepoint and most of our new inventory, the first important piece of the process is Chapel Hill’s inclusionary zoning policy. Simply put, Chapel Hill requires that any new development of homeownership units include approximately 15% to be sold at an affordable rate, and those affordable units become a permanent part of our CHT land trust. Of our current 276 homeownership units, 197 of those are the result of inclusionary zoning.

In Bridgepoint, that means 5 brand new homes will soon be available for purchase to qualified applicants through Community Home Trust. And those homes are “coming to life” even now!

In June 2022, I stopped by the Bridgepoint site to take a look. Here’s what it looked like then.