A tight knit neighbourhood community looks to find a creative solution to address the affordable housing crisis in Guelph.
For 18 years, Junction Village Guelph (JVG) offers a shared community space for neighbours to gather, connect and share.
At the heart of the Junction neighbourhood, are three properties on Meadowview Ave. at 45, 46 and 47 with one 200 ft backyard that spans 100 ft across.
The space is used as a 'public commons', and includes an event tent, potluck dinners, a weekly summer food drop-off, community gardens, a skating rink, trampoline, community meetings, outdoor movie screenings, a sauna and pool.
The goal for JVG co-founders Mike and Mary Kate Craig, is to transform the urban community into a space for neighbours to reflect, connect and play.
Several friends have also purchased houses in the neighbourhood, growing a community, that today, has sharing gardens, bulk food, child care, dog walking, as well as many other opportunities to 'help' one another.
"My children were born around the time when my mom died. And then just after she died, Mike's mom died. So, we had these young children who didn't have any grandmothers," Mary-Kate Craig said.
"I think what became the seed of the Junction Village, was creating intentional family."
Craig, who has a very large family in Ireland and England, has no immediate family locally.
"I have grown up here with a created family, people who my parents have intentionally created a relationship with, and that's who we've had Christmas and Thanksgiving with over the years."
JVG continues to evolve by creating new ways to inspire others to join the community.
"For years, our friend's children could flow into our space, and our children could flow into their space. And that worked really well. Sometimes three of four families came together. We hired our own nanny who worked between houses and different assemblages of children," Craig said.
"That meant that these children could always be together, be at their home, and be with a community of people. They grew up with that. It was just normal."
To make the space community-owned and affordable for all, JVC is currently forming the Junction Village Community Land Trust.
Community land trusts (CLT's) are non-profit organizations that have a primary purpose to acquire, develop and steward permanently affordable housing land, and other assets that contribute to a thriving community.
The Junction Village Community Land Trust aims to secure and protect properties in the community to create permanent affordable housing guided by values such as nature connection, equity, land stewardship and resilient living.
Land is owned collectively by the community, while individual homeowners or tenants own the buildings on the land.
According to the Junction Village Community Land Trust, the purpose is mission driven versus profit driven, something that builds community resilience, involves the community, and preserves land.
They can be funded by government or by concerned social investors. Under the trust’s management, housing on the land is legally bound to remain affordable, despite market changes.
Craig says the CLT isn’t about the buildings as much as it is about community.
"A CLT provides a model for community-driven development that can help transform how we currently live in urban spaces," Craig said.
Craig says the trust can offer a promising alternative to traditional development models.
"We've done a lot of research and analysis over the last five or six years and really tried to think about what might that look like, and it links into a decolonizing conversation around ownership versus stewardship of land," Craig said.
Junction Village Community Land Trust hopes to create something that is intergenerational and that can serve people at different points in their life, from students starting out, to young families, right though to seniors.
In the surrounding neighbourhood, JVC has created relationships with local landlords and is always on the look out for any who would like to work together to create well stewarded and cared for spaces.
What first started as a social experiment, is now opening a new chapter for Junction Village Guelph.
"Because the way that the single family home legislation was set up traditionally, it actually did not allow us to create multiple living spaces to create this kind of village idea that we are trying to create," Craig said.
"We want to create something that functions like an ecosystem that would have many different places that people could stay in, both short and long term," Craig said.
"We're almost at the one year point since creating a land trust. We want to enable a large number of properties to be owned potentially with the intention to hold them inside of community values and for affordable long term spaces for people to live in."
The trust is now becoming much more than just about the Junction Village itself.
"We've done lots of work with giving it a really stable foundation with a great Board of Directors," Craig said.
"This incubated inside of the Junction Village but it is now out there as an offering in the community."
Craig says up until very recently, there were very few examples of community land trusts, nationally.
"Because the way Canada was set up, it blocked these types of initiatives including co-housing, co-living, community land trusts and anything that was going at odds with the idea of a single family home for one family," Craig said.
"About five or six years ago, Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation really drove this forwards by creating funding packages for about 16 pilot community land trusts, many of those, Indigenous."
One of the things funded, was a group called the Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts, a Canadian network of community land trusts that now exist in various areas across the province.
"Community land trusts are popping up all over. It's growing because it's a tool that can meet a variety ot different intentions," Craig said.
"Our intention was that we would like to put our properties into it. That's why we created it. But that's only the tip of the ice berg. We've created something with interesting possibilities."
In Guelph, Craig says there are many over-housed seniors.
"There are seniors home who don't want to leave their house. The community land trust could offer a way for them to put their house into the trust and then the trust could actually build an accessory dwelling unit on their property, which is now legal in Guelph. We could build seniors accessible dwellings of their choice."
Or, Craig says, families could move in and help to support that senior as well.
"It could potentially, be that senior's own family who can't afford to buy a house. If that senior has no family, then we could together, create a way for them to have a chosen family. It's these types of scenarios that I am really excited about," Craig said.
There are several ways to finance and build community land trust-owned land including crowdfunding, donations, community bonds, government grants, partnerships, capital campaigns, community volunteer work, and renting out space.
"There are a bunch of ways people can get involved. We have a story telling circle where we collect stories. We have a finance circle, and an acquisition circle to try to acquire land," Craig said.
Junction Village Community Land Trust invites anyone with fundraising experience, grant writers, and those with legal expertise or economic backgrounds to help create specific economic case studies and business plans.
"If people have skills that they feel would be useful, we are in a place where we would love them to lean in and help us create it," Craig said.
"We have a very strong vision, mission and aim for what this is here to do."
