Nearly 25 years ago, four friends sat in the modest living room of a redwood-shingled home in Point Reyes Station and formulated the idea for the Community Land Trust Association of West Marin. This summer, CLAM will buy the house, fulfilling a special agreement with the late Ruth Fleshman, who spent the last years of her life there with her dog Zack.
CLAM will pay $500,000 for the property, less than half its value, to preserve it as permanently affordable housing. Last Tuesday, the trust secured a $100,000 grant from Marin County, paid for by the Measure W tax on hotels and vacation rentals, that will go toward the purchase.
Ms. Fleshman, a former nurse who died in February at age 92, granted the trust right of first refusal, meaning it can buy the house before anyone else. The proceeds will go to her niece, a single mother who lives in Virginia.
“Ruth Fleshman was kind of a visionary in our community,” said Pam Dorr, the executive director of CLAM. “She really had a proactive way to do this.”
Ms. Fleshman was “very generous with people around her,” said Cynthia Clarkson, her longtime friend and fellow nurse, who once lived in the house. Ms. Clarkson, one of the Point Reyes Station residents who helped envision the community land trust, said her friend recognized the need and was deeply supportive of CLAM’s work. “She was very committed to people having living spaces,” she said.
The Third Street house, tucked between the Point Reyes Emporium building and the Cowgirl Creamery lawn, is enclosed by a white picket fence and shaded by a towering walnut tree. By buying the house, CLAM will remove it from the speculative real estate market, and it plans to convert it into at least one, and up to three, affordable units.
The house could become a rental, or CLAM could sell it to a low-income family at an affordable price. Ms. Dorr expressed a preference for permanent ownership. The need for affordable “forever homes” for first-time buyers is as great as the need for low-cost rentals, she said.
Besides the Measure W grant, CLAM’s purchase will be funded by two loans, including one $448,000 loan from an anonymous private individual that covers the bulk of the project. Ms. Dorr said the trust will pay for the house, a septic engineering study and a structural assessment to make sure the property is in good condition. CLAM will then use its rental or sale income to pay back the lender, whom she said is a local who grew up in West Marin. There are still “too many unknowns,” Ms. Dorr said, to determine what the trust would charge for rent or purchase.
CLAM’s biggest ongoing project, the Coast Guard housing development, is “a marathon, not a sprint,” Ms. Dorr said. Residents won’t be able to move in until 2026. But while the 50-unit development lingers in the environmental review phase, the trust has continued to preserve affordable units on a piecemeal basis, using an assortment of strategies.
Key to its efforts are the good will and good intentions of West Marin’s many property-rich seniors. In January, CLAM agreed to complete necessary repairs on 81-year-old Bobbi Loeb’s Mesa Road home in exchange for a retained life estate—a promise that Ms. Loeb will deed the house to CLAM when she dies—at a third of the house’s market value.
“These planned giving opportunities are pretty exceptional,” Ms. Dorr said.
Ms. Fleshman, who once worked at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic and became an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Nursing, first moved to Point Reyes Station in the early ‘90s, sharing a home with Ms. Clarkson’s family on Mesa Road.
She bought the Third Street house from Terry and Ralph Camiccia in 1995 for $250,000 and collected some income by renting it out. In 2000, one-time tenant Ms. Clarkson and three friends, spurred by a shrinking stock of affordable housing, met there to discuss the steps to create the community land trust that eventually became CLAM.
Several years later, Ms. Fleshman, who had become legally blind, moved into the house, where it was easier to get to stores and the post office. She originally planned to deed the house to her niece, but eventually settled on a plan that would benefit both CLAM and her own family. She floated the idea that CLAM could use the house as an office, or commemorate its founding with a plaque.