Community Land Trust documents success

By John Briggs
Free Press Staff Writer
Friday, September 05, 2003

The Burlington Community Land Trust, chartered as a nonprofit corporation in 1984 to help those with low and moderate incomes buy homes, is accomplishing what it was set up to do, according to a land trust-commissioned study released this week.

The study, prepared by local development consultant John Davis and land trust staffer Amy Demetrowitz, scrutinized the Land Trust's records of the 259 single-family house and condominiums sold since 1984 -- all to first-time homebuyers -- and the 97 land trust properties that have been resold since 1988.

The homes were bought by families unable to put together the down-payments and mortgage payments to buy on the open market.

Brenda Torpy, Burlington Community Land Trust co-director, said the study demonstrated that land trust programs did not -- as some critics have charged -- interfere with open-market home sales. Two open-market real estate experts agree.

"I think the land trust provides a very good service," said David Gray, president of the 430-member Northwestern Vermont Board of Realtors. "I don't feel they compete with us. It offers a vehicle for people in a certain income level to get into a home, so it provides a valuable service."

Brad Chenette, president of the Vermont Real Estate Information Network, said the scale of land trust business is too small to have a noticeable impact on open-market sales.

He said 1,019 Chittenden County houses were sold at market rate in the past 12 months.

The study lists 44 land trust sales for 2002 in Chittenden, Franklin and Grand Isle counties: nine houses, 20 condominiums and 15 resales.

"I'm not aware of (the land trust's) detracting from typical business," Chenette said. "There's a need for certain buyers who don't qualify through regular financing, and it seems that the Land Trust fills that need."

A majority of the Land Trust properties went to families earning less than 80 percent of the area's median income, and all of the buyers over the years had a household income less than the median, the study said.

Though the median value of the Land Trust resold houses rose from about $35,000 in 1988 to slightly more than $80,000 in 2002, the houses remained affordable to low- and moderate-income households -- the average buyer of a resold Land Trust house over the years, the study found, had a household income of 69 percent of the area median income.

Libby Davidson, a free-lance artist, and her husband, a garden manager, bought a Land Trust three-bedroom house in Colchester in 2002 with room enough for their two children and her artist's studio.

"In our case," she said, "because of our income level, we wouldn't have been able to get into a house that would give us adequate space."

The couple had looked for a house on the open market, she said, but realized they could afford only a mobile home or a condominium smaller than the apartment they were trying to escape.

"It'd be great if we were earning enough to qualify on the open market," she said, "but it didn't take long to find it wasn't a reality for us."

The Land Trust, subsidized with money from the city, the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, sells houses and condominiums cheaply -- at less than their appraised value. It retains title to the land.

When Land Trust buyers decide to sell, they earn a modest profit from the appreciated value of their property, the study said, recovering their downpayment and gaining an average of $6,184 in equity.

A majority of the 97 who sold their Land Trust homes moved into homes sold on the open market, the study found.
Contact John Briggs at 660-1863 or jbriggs@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com