New TAHOE housing program in South Lake Tahoe

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. - The Saint Joseph Community Land Trust (SJCLT) has announced a new program that seeks to preserve existing housing stock for permanently affordable, full-time homes for Tahoe Basin employees and residents. It is called the TAHOE (Tahoe Affordable Home Ownership Enabling) program.

TAHOE has been created to do three things:

1. Provide assistance to income-qualified households searching for a home in the Tahoe Basin;

2. Enable SJCLT to purchase available homes to be made available to income-qualified Tahoe Basin employees or full-time residents;
3. Provide assistance to existing homeowners that are at risk of losing their homes due to a financial crisis.

In each case, the homes would be owned by the household being helped subject to a 99-year ground lease from Saint Joseph CLT. The Saint Joseph CLT ground lease ensures that the homes will remain permanently affordable and used as primary residences.

“Saint Joseph Community Land Trust currently provides programs for low and moderate-income rental and expansion of new affordable homeownership," said Lyn Barnett, SJCLT’s president. "The new TAHOE Program is focused on preserving existing homes for our current and future generations of local employees and residents. It is our hope, with the support of local employers and organizations, that the TAHOE Program will help stabilize this community, build family wealth, and decrease negative impacts to the environment caused by long commutes of employees forced-out of the local housing market.”

“There is a need to preserve existing housing inventory for locals providing services to residents and visitors," said South Lake Tahoe City Manager Joseph Irvin. "The St. Joseph CLT has demonstrated it has the foresight and plan in place to appropriately ensure affordable housing supply exists within South Lake Tahoe.”

SJCLT will initially fund the TAHOE Program with a $100,000 deposit into the newly created TAHOE Program Fund at the El Dorado Community Foundation. Additional funds for the TAHOE Program will be sought through grants and donations from foundations, institutions, and individuals.

“Based on the findings of the South Shore Region Housing Needs and Opportunities study, which shows a drop of residential-occupied housing from 61 percent in 2000 to 46 percent in 2017, Saint Joseph CLT has put forth a strategy with their new TAHOE Program that will work to reverse this trend,” said City of South Lake Tahoe Housing Manager Patrick Conway.

"Housing for our local community has been an issue for many years, due to pressure on both availability and affordability," said Chase Janvrin, program manager for the Tahoe Prosperity Center. "Saint Joseph Community Land Trust has taken their already proven model and added a new evolution to help address both of these concerns."

“Securing affordable housing is a critical component of every community. By creating the Saint Joseph Land Trust TAHOE Program a viable and coherent process is created, designed and articulated to achieve homeownership securing the future of families and individuals in an affordable and effective strategy,” said Bill Roby, El Dorado Community Foundation’s executive director.

For more information on the TAHOE program, contact SJCLT Executive Director Jean Diaz at jeandiaz@saintjosephclt.org.

The group's website also contains a lot of information on all of the land trust programs including Motel to Home, low income rentals, employer-assisted equity and low-moderate income homeownership. Find more here - https://www.saintjosephclt.org/.