The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
‘Imagining Oberlin’
Community Land trust seeks to keep housing affordable
The need for affordable housing has led to a new organization in Oberlin.
The Oberlin Community Land Trust had its first membership kick-off event title “Imagining Oberlin” on March 4 which drew about 40 people who joined the group and about 100 total who attended, according to Krista Long, the president of the organization.
Long said she and Liz Burgess, vice president of Oberlin Community Land Trust, derived the idea for the organization about three years ago while the two walked through an Oberlin school building and realized the facility would make a great senior living home.
The women decided to create the Community Land Trust as a way to make such novel thinking about housing a reality, she said.
According to a news release on the organization, community land trusts have a storied history of making housing more affordable and there currently are about 260 such organizations operating across the country.
The Community Land Trust does this by holding the land in a trust which cuts down on the price of housing built on that property, Long said.
“By removing the cost of the land, essentially, we’re subsidizing a home for a first-time homeowner, young families, low- and moderate-income individuals, seniors etc.,” she said.
Long said the organization has been in contact with the schools about their initial thought about putting senior housing into one of their school buildings which will no longer be used once the district builds its new all-in-one campus.
“We had a small committee that walked through Eastwood School, in particular, and it seemed from what research we did at that time, that it could potentially work,” she said. “We are continuing to stay in touch with the schools.
“Those buildings would not be available for three years essentially, so we have a lot of work to do to get ready to take on a project like that anyway.”
Consultant hired
The organization received a grant from the Community Foundation of Lorain County early into the process which Long said was used to fund bringing consultant Marge Misak into the fold.
According to the release, Misak was the director of the land trust program at Neighborhood Housing Solutions of Greater Cleveland and now works as an independent consultant in the field.
“I was so excited to be a part of this process with the Oberlin Community Land Trust,” Misak said in the release. “There is a strong correlation between housing and the health of a community.
“And community land trusts are an excellent tool to help communities keep housing costs affordable.”
Long said the group spent about a year with Misak to understand the intricacies of the complex organization and they’ve recently filed as a corporation with the state and now working on securing designation as a nonprofit organization.
“We’ve made quite a bit of progress,” she said. “Now the challenges are business planning fundraising, because all of this is going to be expensive, initially.”
That was the goal of the March 4 kickoff, Long said.
“Here we are, we want to be a membership organization so we can have a broad base of support,” she said.
As part of the event, the organization showed architectural drawings from students at Kent State University.
“It was exciting to see the kinds of ideas they came up with for some of our target properties that we’re looking at,” Long said.
“The students were excited and revved up, but mostly it was there to an- nounce this organization and to begin our fundraising efforts.”
Now, Long explained, the organization will begin investigating potential properties to bring into the trust.
According to the release, the group has looked into the Oberlin Schools building at 218 N. Pleasant St. and the former site of the Oberlin Bait Canteen Company on Sumner Street.
These are the properties the Kent students made conceptual drawings of.
After that initial event, Long said the Community Foundation of Lorain County gave the organization a $15,000 challenge grant.
“Our initial fundraiser will be to match that grant, and we have less than a year to do that,” she said. “We, obviously, need to reach farther than that.”