Anthony Foster has lived in the same two-bedroom apartment in a Toronto Community Housing building for 14 years. The building is a six-unit, market-rent triplex at Bloor and Bathurst. For a while, the 34-year-old had a roommate, but currently, it’s just him and his dog, a rescue named Abby. When Foster found the place, back in 2008, he was a second-year student at the University of Toronto. He stumbled across the apartment through a friend of a friend, but was so excited to find a convenient and affordable place, he signed a lease before he’d even set foot in it (a glimpse through the windows was enough). It was, Foster said later, a “godsend”—close to school, downtown, the TTC. The rent, which currently sits around $1500 a month, was within his means.

Created in 2002 in the wake of Mike Harris’ forced amalgamation of the city, the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) combined two other agencies to become the second-largest housing provider in North America. For years, the Harris government had been attacking and undermining affordable housing: in the mid-90s, it cancelled hundreds of construction contracts; in 2000, it was the first provincial government to download full responsibility for social housing to municipalities. Now, TCHC owns and manages about 60,000 rental housing units, but it is a highly politicized entity, its executive and budget consistently shaped by leadership at City Hall.

TCHC may not have had the greatest reputation, but as far as Foster was concerned, it turned out to be a decent enough landlord. There were hiccups—a lease that initially shifted inappropriate costs onto tenants, and later, some neglected repairs—but Foster chalked those up to the agency’s massive bureaucracy. More worrisome to him was a growing sense of precarity. While he was perfectly content in his home, he became increasingly concerned, as Toronto’s rents and real estate prices skyrocketed around him, about its long-term stability. (According to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Toronto increased almost 47 percent between the time Foster signed his lease and fall 2021.) He felt that the city had a long history of selling public assets for short-term gain, and feared that, with time, it might sell off buildings like his. Finding another affordable apartment in the downtown core would be extremely difficult. “I likely would have had to leave the city altogether,” he says, “given current rents.” He was lucky, he had a job, working in health care. But his other neighbours, some of them elderly, didn’t have as many options. Foster also occasionally provided a safe harbour for his siblings. One of his brothers had struggled with addiction and was currently unhoused; Foster let him stay with him when he needed. When another brother was “renovicted,” he moved in with Foster too. If he lost the apartment, his whole family would be upended.

Then, a couple years ago, TCHC came to tell Foster that his building was being sold. Sort of. As part of its Tenants First project, launched in 2018 to improve the quality and services of TCHC, the city planned to transfer its so-called “scattered housing portfolio” of 637 single-family homes to non-profit social housing providers. The city and TCHC issued a request for proposals from providers, promising that Foster and all other tenants would be able to stay in their homes, and any existing rent subsidies would continue. But the transfer was delayed, and there was less and less communication from TCHC. What if they didn’t receive an adequate proposal? Foster’s uncertainty grew.

On April 1, 2022, however, he and his neighbours finally received some good news. Their building was being purchased by a not-for-profit charitable organization, a community land trust (CLT) known as the Neighbourhood Land Trust, in conjunction with YWCA Toronto, with both organizations pledging that they would forever maintain the building as affordable housing. And they hadn’t just acquired Foster’s apartment, but 81 TCHC single-family homes and small buildings all over Toronto’s west end. Most of these tenants had no idea what The Neighbourhood Land Trust was, but its mandate—basically, to take land out of the market and let the community own and manage it—was undeniably compelling.

Foster was, of course, deeply relieved. At the same time, there were new questions. The first one was obvious—how did a community land trust even work? “It was nothing I’d been aware of or considered before,” Foster says of the concept. But once he became more familiar with the ideas behind the CLT, and learned he and his neighbours could participate in the management of their own residence and community, he saw a revolutionary potential. “It really opened people’s eyes,” Foster says, “to different forms of sustainable occupancy—to different ways of being.”

The very first community land trust, New Communities Inc., emerged from the American civil rights movement more than 50 years ago. In 1969, in rural Georgia, community organizers were looking for a way to protect African Americans from the eviction and job loss that desegregation had engendered. Taking ownership of the land they lived, worked, and farmed on looked like the best, most direct path to independence and security. Inspired by the kibbutz movement in Israel, the organizers purchased a large parcel of farmland, with profits from the sale of soy and corn used to service debt on the land. While discrimination and drought led to the collapse of the original farm in 1985, New Communities continued its mission of economic and community development. It also paved the way for dozens of other innovative CLTs across the U.S. and Europe, each with distinctive ambitions, governance structures, and financial arrangements.

When Bernie Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1980s, he famously championed a CLT as a way to create affordable housing in that city; it became, and remains, the largest, most successful land trust in the country. Canada was slow to adopt the model, with a few CLTs created in the 80s, largely tied to the co-op housing network or to rural land conservation. But a couple decades later, as major cities grew increasingly dense, with gentrification rampant and real estate overheating, the model became increasingly attractive.

Parkdale, a diverse working-class neighbourhood in Toronto’s west end, long resisted the feverish housing market that transformed the city. The neighbourhood’s grit, poverty, and a perceived sense of lawlessness protected it, in a way, from speculators. But as waves of gentrification moved westward, along Queen Street West and across Liberty Village, Parkdale, too, would eventually succumb. The first, familiar stage of gentrification involved middle- and higher-income households purchasing homes, often converting multi-unit houses back into single-family residences. The commercial and retail strip went through its own paroxysms, with fast-food franchises and dive bars displaced by high-end restaurants, nightclubs, and hip boutiques.

By 2010, however, as land values escalated, and real estate became further out of reach, a second, even more pernicious, stage of gentrification arrived. The non-profits that had long served Parkdale’s marginalized communities began to lose their spaces to profiteering landlords. The rental towers along Jameson Avenue, for decades a reliable landing place for recent immigrants and refugees, were bought up by large, multinational corporations and real estate investment trusts. The towers were renovated and upgraded, with rents then steeply increased. At the same time, real estate developers began to form land assemblies, allowing them to group together smaller parcels of land—removing existing properties first—and build larger projects, usually condos. Long-time residents were quickly priced out, some fleeing to the suburbs, but others, with less choice, ending up on the streets and in the shelter system.

But Parkdale also has a long history of community organizing and policy advocacy. While social service organizations and residents’ groups watched the neighbourhood’s transformations with dismay, they also began figuring out ways to disrupt them. “Change happens in neighbourhoods,” says Kuni Kamizaki, an assistant professor in U of T’s planning department, “but the way change happens is not always inevitable.” In 2010, while pursuing his master’s at U of T, Kamizaki was part of a student research project to study the impact of gentrification on food security. One of the group’s recommendations was to create a community land trust that would preserve Parkdale’s character and protect its most marginalized residents and groups. If market forces were causing residents to lose democratic control of their own neighbourhood, then taking the land out of the market, and stewarding it for the benefit of the community, could be a way to regain that control. “When we look at issues of gentrification and displacement,” Kamizaki says, “often, if not always, it comes down to who owns what. The question of ownership is essential.” Several other grassroots neighbourhood organizations—including the West End Food Co-op, the Parkdale Residents’ Association, and Parkdale Community Legal Services—immediately got behind the idea. After numerous community consultations, they incorporated the Neighbourhood Land Trust (NLT) as a not-for-profit charitable organization (and the charitable arm of the more neighbourhood-specific Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust).

Joshua Barndt, a community artist who had also done his master’s in community planning at the New School in New York, joined the NLT as a volunteer in 2014. He’d grown up in Parkdale, and was well aware of the diverse class interests at play there. At Fern Avenue Public School, his classmates included kids from all of the world, but also from all over the neighbourhood—some lived in the grand Victorians near High Park, while others lived in shelters. At the New School, he studied the Cooper Square Community Land Trust, and also saw in the CLT model a way to save Parkdale from intensifying class warfare. In 2018, after four years as a development coordinator, he became executive director of the NLT.

Under Barndt’s leadership, the NLT refined the M.O. they’d developed with 87 Milky Way: community members consulted and invited into the governance structure, and a deliberate, comprehensive, and transparent education process. Before acquiring or developing any property, Barndt and his team interviewed members of the community, collected and analyzed data, and then presented their findings publicly. The process emerged from an impulse of inclusion, but also, Barndt admits, some ignorance, too. “Milky Way felt like a good project,” he says, “but we knew that housing was the main priority, because that’s what residents told us. But because we didn’t have experience with housing development, we thought we should seek to understand the problem as best we could before we did anything.”