You can hear the passion in Curtis Whiley’s voice when he talks about communal stewardship, the very idea at the heart of the Upper Hammonds Plains Community Land Trust’s 136-unit development.
It also happens to be Canada’s largest Black-led housing project of its kind.
“I spent a lot of the early years explaining how this could work and talking to folks about what communal stewardship can look like,” Whiley told The Chronicle Herald from the building site on Equestrian Lane.
“The community land trust model is rooted in Black history, back to the civil rights movement, and it’s incredible and profound to use a model Black people generations before us used to resist and stabilize and protect themselves, and we’re using that same model today.”
A community land trust isn’t a housing model with many examples locally, although groups like the United Way explored it as an option to create more affordable housing. The basic principle is that a group of people, like Whiley’s community in Upper Hammonds Plains, forms an organization to buy and hold lands for its communal benefit.