Gabriel Sanders on LOCAL

How long did you live on the Monterey Peninsula before you considered yourself a local?

You know you’re a local when you stop checking Yelp and just know which places to go depending on the day of the week. When you can give someone directions using landmarks only locals recognize. When half the places you love aren’t on a tourist map.

Being local isn’t just about where you live. It’s when your life starts to run on the same rhythms as the town.

But that sense of belonging depends on the people who make a community function. The teachers in our schools. The nurses in our clinics. The people who keep our local businesses running.

And increasingly, those people are leaving Monterey. Not because they want to, but because the cost of living here is pushing them out. The single largest driver of that cost? Housing.

Gabriel Sanders, founder of the Monterey Opportunity Housing Trust, believes that being a local depends on community stability and on critical workers having the ability to remain here and build their lives. MOHT is a community land trust gathering impact investment for workforce housing and converting commercial properties into affordable homes while making the owners more money. Using a model grounded in California tax law and community finance, MOHT creates housing that stays affordable in effective perpetuity.

In this talk, you will learn:

Learn about the true effect of housing costs on our community, how a community land trust removes land from the speculative real estate market and keeps it under local governance, and why local commercial property owners can often earn more by partnering with MOHT than by renting at market rate. It also explores what the cost of capital really means for local workforce housing and how you, as a local investor, business owner, or neighbor, can help build the community you want to live in.