Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Cortes Community Housing purchased a property with two houses at 671 Sutil Point Road. This will be the first property to go into the island's new land trust, formed in response to Cortes Island's housing forum last December. The housing society has been active on Cortes for 6 or 7 years and made a lot of progress in buying Rainbow Ridge. Having that acreage for housing and community needs is a really great opportunity and sets us apart in many ways from some of our other island neighbors like Quadra, for instance, where they're working to acquire land, explained Sadhu Johnston, Executive Director of Cortes Community Housing. We've been struggling to get BC Housing funding to build on that land and  we recently heard we weren't successful. That's the 3rd time we had applied. We did get $100,000 from BC Housing to continue to get the project shovel ready. So they're not abandoning us, they're just not ready to fund it. They're really prioritizing cities. I think 80% to 90% of the funding from the last round of BC Housing funding that was designated for the Vancouver Island region went to Victoria. We cannot rely on provincial support to solve this problem here. We need it, but it's been years of trying to get it. We really are needing to diversify our approach, both on Rainbow Ridge land, but also across the community. We are continuing to progress the 24 townhome development on Rainbow Ridge and we just received funding from the SRD to build the road into the development site.We're looking at creative ways that we can still bring housing to the Rainbow Ridge land even if it's not subsidized housing, if it's more of a rental housing option.We are purchasing our first home, thanks to the generous donation of 1 of our Cortes neighbors.  That property is about 3 acres and it has 2 houses on it. It has a well, it has septic, it has power backup systems. It has beautiful gardens, and a big shop. I'm personally really excited by this opportunity because we get to provide rental housing immediately, but there's also the opportunity for other community uses with the shop and the agricultural land. It's a very centrally located. It's a walkable site. People can walk straight into Manson's, to the school, or to Smelt Bay and Manson's Lagoon.We have over 200 people on our wait list. So we're going to put a call out and then,  if we don't get interest from that, we'll go more broadly to the community Having secure rental housing Is really important for people that often have to move over and over and over again. That's the basic objective. We get to provide housing for people that need it. We get to maintain community ownership in the land.  This land will be owned by all of us as a community and over time, we could even add additional cabins to the land to provide more housing.  That would be something that we'll be looking to do. The objective is also to ensure that as houses come up for sale,  they aren't just sold to off-Islanders for summer housing, that we maintain existing homes for community use and for housing people on the Island,  not just bringing new people to the Island or converting those family homes to summer houses for off Islanders.