Thom Armstrong has been the CEO of the Co-operative Housing Federation of BC for over two decades. The federation is also leading an innovation in the use of the CLT model by forming a land trust as a directly owned subsidiary. By pooling the land holdings of a group of co-ops, the land trust can borrow against the existing co-op housing equity, and leverage those funds to rapidly develop more co-op housing.
Co-ops in Canada, Armstrong emphasizes, typically follow the model that Torpy uses in Vermont. “Virtually all the housing co-ops in Canada are nonprofits, or what Europeans would call rental housing co-ops,” Armstrong notes.
Armstrong explains that these co-ops “developed under a series of federal programs that began in 1973 and tapped out in 1992.” In British Columbia, Armstrong says, there are about 275 housing co-ops that serve over 15,000 families. He adds that overall, there are about 75,000 families housed in other forms of nonprofit-managed housing. Co-ops, therefore, form a sizeable part of the province’s social housing ecosystem—but they’re far from a majority.
In British Columbia, a few housing co-ops have long existed on CLT land. But between 2012 and 2015, Armstrong says, there were a “series of conversations at the municipal government level about how a community land trust model could be used to generate a new supply of affordable housing.”
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