Letter: Amherst Community Land Trust Looks To Purchase Single Family Home

The Amherst Community Land Trust (ACLT) is working with a low-income family to purchase a home in Amherst and we need your help. The recent surge in demand for housing has made it extremely hard to find, let alone actually acquire, a home listed for sale that meets our program needs. So we are reaching out to our neighbors to seek an owner who might be interested in selling directly to ACLT to meet the immediate housing need of one low-income family while also seeing the house kept permanently affordable for future homebuyers.

We aim to purchase a single family home, ideally three or four bedrooms, in Amherst sometime in spring or summer 2022. By contributing to the purchase price and taking joint ownership of the property with the purchasing family, ACLT will make homeownership affordable to them (housing will cost no more than 30% of their income) and will also establish permanent restrictions that will ensure the home remains affordable to subsequent buyers.

Benefits to a seller in working with ACLT include the simplicity of arranging a sale with an identified buyer, the potential for a tax benefit if the sale price is below the appraised market value, and the assurance that the house sold will remain a community asset as an affordable, owner-occupied home. Funding and program rules limit the total price ACLT and our homebuyer can offer to $345,000 or less, depending on home size and condition, but because ACLT is a nonprofit organization, any difference between the home’s appraised value and a lesser sale price can be treated as a charitable contribution for tax purposes.

ACLT is an all-volunteer nonprofit serving Amherst, founded in 2014 to address the shortage of affordable housing in town and to strengthen year-round family neighborhoods. To date we have housed three low-income families, two in partnership with Habitat for Humanity, in homes that are now resale-restricted to remain affordable in perpetuity. Like our current project, those efforts were supported in part from the Town of Amherst’s Community Preservation Act funds. In addition, we are in the process making two donated properties available and permanently affordable for low and moderate income families. We aim to continue to build on this success and we hope you can help.

If you have a property that might fit our needs, please email amherstcommunitylandtrust@gmail.com or call ACLT Vice President, Jim Oldham at 413-253-1930 if you want to learn more. Please help spread the word about our search, and if you would like to get involved, please let us know that too— ACLT welcomes new members. Let’s make home ownership in Amherst affordable for all!

Linda Slakey

Linda Slakey is President Of the Amherst Community Land Trust