As housing prices continue to rise in Bend, a local nonprofit is looking at a new way to make homes affordable: a community land trust.

In a community land trust, residents own their homes but a trust owns the land those homes sit on, keeping home costs lower. While several community land trusts exist in the Pacific Northwest, no such communities exist in Bend.

Kôr Community Land Trust, a Bend-based nonprofit organization formed a few years ago, plans to change that. It’s working with Housing Works, and the two groups have received about $170,000 from the city of Bend during the past two years to put toward building five cottages on trust-owned land.

The city funding and private donations will pay to subdivide and add infrastructure on a half-acre property on SE 27th Street and Hurita Place, said Amy Warren, co-founder of Kôr. Construction could start next spring.

Warren, who has worked in construction since 2002, was looking at ways to build more energy-efficient homes. She went back to school at Oregon State University-Cascades in 2011 to study energy systems engineering and became interested in the concept of net-zero-energy homes.

“We started more with a concept for an intentional community,” she said. “It’s an overall conscious approach to building in conference with affordability.”

She learned about the Lopez Island Community Land Trust, a Washington organization that has several net-zero neighborhoods. The land trust model seemed like a good way to create affordable, energy-efficient homes in Bend, Warren said.

“It was very much a no-brainer for us,” she said. “If we could build homes and energy-efficient homes for the people who need them, why not?”

Homes with net-zero energy usage and yards and common areas irrigated by grey water mean fewer bills for the land trust’s homeowners. But the main affordability component of land trust homes comes with the trust itself.

Typical subsidized housing projects carry deed restrictions for a number of years — 30 is a common number. When that time is up, the homes can be sold to anyone at any price.

Community land trusts, meanwhile, always own the land a home is on and can limit home prices in perpetuity.

“When they sell, they take a little bit of equity but not as much as if they sell on the open market,” Warren said.

Because the community land trust model ensures that homes are always affordable, they’re an efficient way to use government subsidies, said Jackie Keogh, fund development manager for Proud Ground. The Portland-based community land trust is the largest in the Pacific Northwest and one of the largest in the country.

“You put the subsidy in the home once, and it stays in that home forever,” Keogh said.

During the nearly 20 years it’s been active, Proud Ground has served 350 families in 280 homes, she said. They’re all first-time homeowners who make between 60 percent and 80 percent of the area median income.

Oregon’s statewide housing affordability crisis and ever-rising land prices make it a lot harder for many people to afford to own homes, Keogh said.

“People who live and work and play in the community can no longer afford to live in the community,” she said.

In Bend, three of Kôr’s five planned cottages would be limited to homebuyers who make less than 80 percent of the area median income. For a family of four, that’s less than $51,200 a year.

One would be rented to a senior who makes less than 50 percent of the area median income, and one would be sold to a family making between 80 percent and 120 percent of the median.

“We’re really more targeting a lot of those public service jobs, people who can’t afford to buy now,” Warren said.

—  Reporter: 541-633-2160; jshumway@bendbulletin.com