Affordable housing topic at Jmst meeting

Jamestown (CSi) Affordable housing was the topic of Tuesday’s Jamestown Area Chamber of Commerce, Local and Regional Issues Committee in joint session with the South Central Homeless Coalition meeting.

The meeting held at Shady’s, featured Emily Wright, from the Grand Forks Community Land Trust.

The committees hosted Wright to begin talks about possibly starting such efforts regionally.

She talked about how the Grand Forks area built affordable housing units, utilizing the Land Trust program, and how a similar process might be able to be used for Jamestown affordable housing.

Her organization offers dual-ownership housing, where a purchasing party would purchase the structure of a home and the land trust would retain the land, saving the purchaser costs. Purchasers are responsible for taxes and insurance on the homes.

Stutsman County Housing Authority Director, David Klein Executive Director answered questions about housing in the area, saying Jamestown has a lack of available starter homes on the market