A nonprofit started in Palm Coast, FL hopes to bring affordable housing to Okaloosa County through a community land trust.
Cyril Stubbs Jr., President of the Okaloosa County Community Land Trust, grew up in Miami. He said his concerns about housing costs in Florida began decades before he moved to Okaloosa County, when his mother, Sandra Shank’s, foster home, Abundant Life Ministries- Hope House Inc., gave him a firsthand look at the housing crisis’s impact on Florida’s youth.
“My parents actually started the [CLT’s] parent organization back in 2003,” Stubbs said. “It started out as a group home for teenage boys, 13 to 18, that were abandoned, abused, orphaned or neglected. From there, my mom was noticing how housing instability influenced these children in a negative way, and so she had a vision back in, like, 2007 for a development that was centered around those kids transitioning out of foster care into independent living.”
The Army moved Stubbs to Crestview in 2021, where he said he noticed housing challenges similar to what he saw in Flagler County.
“Just driving around [in Crestview], you can see the impact [on] a small, rural community that’s overlooked, and then the lack of public transportation, rising housing prices and just the supply and demand of housing because of the military.”
These challenges inspired Stubbs to start the Okaloosa County CLT, which the Florida Housing Coalition certified last week, according to as per a Facebook post by ALM-HHI.
According to the Shimberg Center for Housing Studies, a full-time worker in Okaloosa County needs to make $34.33/hour to afford a typical 2-bedroom apartment, which Stubbs said is unattainable.
“What really gets to me is you have these home prices here that don’t reflect the wages at all,” he said.
The CLT model addresses this issue by ensuring that certain properties remain affordable indefinitely, regardless of the commercial housing market’s ups and downs.
“How that happens is, say for instance you go and you buy a house,” Stubbs said. “You get a down payment assistance, right? That is not tied to the person. That is tied to the unit, so it stays with the home. For a homeowner, because that subsidy stays with the home, when they go to sell, they don’t get to benefit off of 100% of the market rate.”
Representatives of the Okaloosa County CLT spoke at the Okaloosa County School District meeting on June 22, asking board members to consider the nonprofit’s bid for property at 320 Miracle Strip Parkway, the site of Mary Esther Elementary School, which closed after the 2025-26 school year. The Okaloosa County School Board owns 901 acres of land across 87 properties, according to the property appraiser. The board operates 36 schools, after closing Longwood and Mary Esther Elementaries. 20 of the listed properties on the Okaloosa Property Appraiser’s website are listed as “0 acres” — meaning a little more than half of the school district’s property portfolio does not host a school site.
“I know that [the property is] appraised far above what we offered, but I think if we take a look at it and see what we can provide to be a leader as a school district in Florida and say … we care about our students, we care about our teachers and we care about our support staff; How do we do that? We provide them with a place to call home.”
Stubbs said collaboration between the CLT and organizations like OCSD helps the nonprofit carry out its mission.
“The School Board is one of the largest property owners in the county. If they want to work together and build projects or they have, like Mary Esther School, their properties, like surplus lands [to donate], that’d be great. But you know, we have to be creative as a nonprofit on how we acquire and build, but we have the advantage that we are also a nonprofit developer, so we have financing to where we can go ahead and acquire properties at their market rate.”
Though OCSD did not accept the CLT’s bid for 320 Miracle Strip Parkway, Stubbs said he is “continuing talks with the school to see what [they] can do.”
Looking ahead, Stubbs hopes for the Okaloosa County CLT to have around 50 acres of land and 50 homes within the next five years.
“We don’t have to build homes. Say, you know, you have a grandparent that wants to keep their home in the family,” Stubbs said. “They can put in the land trust and protect affordability, and that’s how we can acquire a home. If they have land that they want to donate — like our permanent supportive housing development; That was land that was donated to us in Flagler County, so if there’s land that wants to be donated, put it in the land trust.”
Once development begins, anyone eligible for state housing assistance will qualify for affordable living through the CLT.
“They go through the same process,” Stubbs said. “They’d be able to purchase market-rate rent. The only thing that happens [differently] with a community land trust, which I think is very important to understand, is that it’s the separation of the building and the land, and the benefit to that is they’re not paying property taxes because that is not assessed in their evaluation.”
Stubbs encourages community members to attend city and county meetings, and said showing local governments that the community supports a CLT will advance its goals.
“People don’t know what they don’t know, and that includes your elected officials,” he said. “… Once we find properties and acquire properties, you know, that’s shovels in the ground. … There are different options out there for people to be successful and reach that goal, or that American Dream of being a homeowner.”
