East Bay Cohousing is excited to bring attention to the great work of our partner in building cooperative community in the East Bay, the Bay Area Community Land Trust (BACLT), which is having its annual meeting this afternoon.

EBCOHO has been a long supporter of Community Land Trusts, with Cohousing Coach/co-organizer Betsy Morris documenting their role nationally in affordable cohousing, and developing exploring partnerships with Northern California Land Trust (NCLT) (which owns the land under Mariposa Grove Cohousing, as well as Betsy's prior community, Addison Court Housing Coop) and learning from other cohousing communities across the country and their CLT partnerships.

While BACLT's primary focus is on resident-led affordable housing, sometimes without separate private facilities, or without a full Common House, they are pursuing cohousing-scale neighborhood development in some existing buildings, and are sponsors for an affordable senior-cohousing project vision. Like us, they are active in East Bay Housing Organizations (EBHO), which has featured both their recently-acquired Fairmount House and Golden Gate Cohousing and our community tours, and EBCOHO members like Alice Green and Jonathan Youtt, as part of annual Affordable Housing Week.

We are very much in support of the organizing work they are doing locally to enact (by council vote or citizen's initiative) Tenant Opportunities to Purchase Acts (TOPA), which can give existing residents a meaningful "right of first refusal" to buy their existing homes in partnerships with groups like BACLT that have access to the finance needed.

BACLT is about to close on ShadeTree Artisan Development Enterprise (SHADE), a live-work artists' coop in Oakland that EBCOHO co-organizer/Cohousing Coach Raines Cohen helped finance through a self-directed IRA investment.

Stop in and learn more about what they're doing and how they do it, and how you can support their work and get involved.