Reflections on TCF’s What Matters: Housing Affordability
Guest post by Karen Stegman, CHT Board member
The Triangle region is critically short of housing. All types of housing. For all types of people, at all different phases of life. That was one of the key messages coming out of the Triangle Community Foundation’s What Matters: Housing Affordability convening in Raleigh earlier this month. I had the honor of representing Community Home Trust, along with Daniele Berman, Vice President of Strategy and Operations, at this exhilarating gathering, where The Triangle’s diversity of housing needs was well-represented by a variety of housing providers, advocates, policymakers, and funders.
Listening to Keynote speaker Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance, speaking to the nationwide housing scarcity we are experiencing and Samuel Gunter, Executive Director of the North Carolina Housing Coalition addressing its localized impacts, it was clear that CHT was made for this moment. As CHT celebrates its 300th home, the community land trust model as a key path to increasing homeownership is just beginning to get traction more broadly across our state and country. Why now? CHT relies on a tri-sector partnership model that leverages the strengths of government, non-profit and private developers – this shared value model allows each partner to contribute what they do best for the good of the community while spreading the costs across. And most importantly, the land trust model is one of the only ways to guarantee permanent affordability.
CHT blazed the local land trust trail 35 years ago and also continues to innovate ways to forge more paths to homeownership than ever before. While there is no one approach that will solve the affordable housing crisis, CHT can serve as a model to feasibility and replicability, and a way to rapidly expand pathways to homeownership for so many in our community for whom it is currently out of reach.
