She remains grateful for those housing opportunities, but because there were time limits on how long families could stay, it made it impossible for her and her daughters to put down roots. Before buying her three-bedroom Lowry townhouse for $165,000, Whitson, a single mom, was living in transitional housing for families facing homelessness with her two daughters, then ages 4 and 6. Moving into a land trust home in 2015 provided Whitney Whitson and her family with stability. Of the 125 residents that have sold their Colorado Community Land Trust homes and moved on, 68 percent have gone on to buy market-rate homes. Fourteen more homes in Lowry are expected to go up for sale early next year. Today, the trust has 186 homes in Lowry, three in Speer and 11 townhomes completed in 2017 in the Cole neighborhood. A few years later, when the mortgage crisis hit, Lowry was rocked by foreclosures, but the trust didn’t lose a single home. Founded in 2002 in Lowry as a means to keep at least 10 percent of the new housing built on the former Air Force base affordable, Colorado Community Land Trust sold its first homes in late 2004. “We work them to support them if they hit a financial rough patch. “What land trusts do is what we call stewardship, which means we work with our homeowners from before the time they bought their home to when they might sell it and everything that could happen in between,” Harrington said. There is no cashing in on huge equity increases as many have done in the private market. They have to resell the home at a discounted price to another qualified buyer, and they can take no more than 20 percent of the increase of the home’s value with them when they sell, depending on how long they have lived there. There is a catch for Colorado Community Land Trust homeowners. The land underneath the home remains the property of the trust and is leased to the homeowner for a self-renewing 99-year term. Harrington’s Colorado Community Land Trust is set to sell a townhouse this month for less than $200,000. “When it comes to homeownership, that’s the largest asset that most people own in their lifetime, and what a land trust does is really helps provide that valuable asset for a family but also makes it so it becomes a community asset, a piece of public infrastructure.” “We can’t have a functioning economy and functional society without providing places for people to call home,” said Fanchi, the former head of Habitat for Humanity of Colorado. By making them permanently affordable, Fanchi views the properties Elevation is acquiring and building with development partners as community assets, as valuable as roads and bridges.
Its pipeline includes 60 scattered homes in Denver and a 92-unit affordable condo project near the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Santa Fe Drive. Ultimately, through partnerships with Aurora, Denver, Longmont, Loveland and potentially other Colorado cities, Elevation is aiming to establish a network of 700 permanently affordable housing units across Colorado. Once Elevation’s staff gets an income-qualified family into that home, it will move on to seven other houses in the surrounding neighborhood, all expected to be occupied by the end of the year, said Elevation president and CEO Stefka Fanchi. Aurora matched the donation-backed land trust’s investment in the property dollar for dollar, officials said. It’s a renovated five-bedroom house on Kenton Street. Officials with the fledgling Elevation Community Land Trust and the city of Aurora gathered late last month to celebrate the organization’s first home getting ready to hit the market. That expansion starts with one house in Aurora.
Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close MenuĮfforts to create new trusts and extend that reach have been ramping up since 2017 and are now poised make big impacts this year and beyond.
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