The local affordable housing organization Community Home Trust has helped provide homes for hundreds of Chapel Hillians since its founding 23 years ago – and last month, it earned a big recognition for those efforts.
“We were awarded the GSK (GlaxoSmithKline) Impact Award the week before Thanksgiving,” says longtime Home Trust executive director Robert Dowling. “(It) was given to nine Triangle-area nonprofits, and we were the only one in Orange County.”
The honor comes with a $40,000 grant. “That will support the operations of our organization,” Dowling says, “and allow us to do the work that we do – selling homes, reselling homes, doing property management, educating home buyers, providing post-purchase maintenance classes, (and) supporting our homeowners with long-term maintenance.
“We do a whole host of things, and we run a deficit annually – and this $40,000 will help close that deficit.”
Robert Dowling spoke with Aaron Keck on WCHL earlier this week.
Founded in 1991, Community Home Trust is a nonprofit company that’s dedicated to preserving a supply affordable housing in Orange County – a place where affordable housing is often very difficult to come by. The Home Trust buys housing units and sells them – at below-market rates – to residents who make less than 80 percent of the median income in Orange County.
“Our bread and butter tends to be people who make between $30-50,000,” Dowling says. “Those are the people we sell homes to – who typically are teachers and public sector employees and social workers and bus drivers, who typically cannot afford to purchase a home in Chapel Hill-Carrboro.”
The Home Trust sold its first home in 2000, but that’s grown to about 200 affordable units today – aided partly by the towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, which have both passed inclusionary zoning policies requiring 15 percent of the housing units in new developments to be set aside as “affordable.”
Dowling says that enables the Home Trust to provide affordable homes in Meadowmont, Greenbridge, 140 West, and other neighborhoods where the housing is otherwise very expensive.
“We have homes scattered throughout the community, where low-income people get to be integrated within these new neighborhoods,” Dowling says. “I think it’s a wonderful thing that our local elected officials have instituted in the last 10 to 15 years.”
And Dowling says that policy – and the Home Trust’s ongoing efforts – are only going to be more essential in the coming years.
“Housing is expensive here,” he says, “and I don’t think it’s going to get any cheaper – and in the long run, there’s just not a lot of land here to be developed, and land is not going to get less expensive.
“So housing will remain expensive, the University will continue to grow, the health care system will continue to grow – and where will these people live?”
If you’d like to help out the Community Home Trust, you can visit them online at CommunityHomeTrust.org. Dowling says they’re always looking for donations and volunteers.
“We’re happy to take donations from anybody at any time, (and) people who want to work with our organization to help us out can contact me,” he says. “We need volunteers, we need board members, we need committee members, we need ambassadors who help us spread the word about what we do throughout the community – and we welcome people who want to volunteer to help out.”
And if you’re in the market for housing in Orange County, you can also head to CommunityHomeTrust.org to take a look at what they have to offer.
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