Marin Community Foundation executive explores land bank venture

A longtime Marin Community Foundation staff member is leaving to explore the feasibility of creating a community land bank in the county.

Johnathan Logan, vice president of community engagement, joined the foundation in 2016 after working 12 years for the Marin City Community Services District, including six years as its general manager.

“I’m really feeling called to join all the great nonprofit partners and others who have identified affordable housing as a major crisis,” he said.

Land banks, which typically are created by local governmental jurisdictions, buy and hold properties for development.

The Marin Community Foundation announced it will provide a $575,000 grant over two years to help underwrite the venture. In its initial announcement, the foundation said that while Logan would lead the project, the grant would go to the Essential Housing Fund.

The reference to the fund has since been removed in an online posting, and Logan declined to say why, but did say that his project will have a fiscal sponsor and the sponsor won’t be the foundation. Fiscal sponsorship allows a tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organization to bestow its tax-exempt status and other benefits on another organization.

“Just to be clear,” Logan said, “this initial work is really to study the feasibility of creating a land bank in Marin County.”

Logan said he will assess the financial viability of a land bank and try to identify various funding sources.

“I feel really strongly like this is a tool that would complement many of the current affordable housing efforts in Marin,” he said.

The foundation also announced that it will provide a $25,520 grant to Hope Housing, a new Marin City land trust, to enable a feasibility study of a possible acquisition.

Logan there are similarities between land trusts and land banks. He said the main difference is that a land trust is a long-term vehicle for acquiring, holding and operating a property, while a land bank is meant to be a more short-term endeavor.

“Part of the vision,” Logan said, “is for the land bank to have financial resources identified and ready to act quickly in order to compete for properties. If they’re sold to a market-rate operator or developer, then we lose precious affordable housing.”

The Essential Housing Fund is the nonprofit arm of the Catalyst Housing Group, a Larkspur company that has carved a niche for itself by developing rental housing for what some have dubbed the “missing middle,” households who earn too much to qualify for affordable housing and too little to afford market-rate apartments.

For example, when Catalyst purchased the 200-apartment Summit complex in Sausalito in 2021, it reserved a third of the apartments for people earning 80% of the local median income, a third for people earning 100% of median income and a third for those earning 120% of the median.

Catalyst makes the projects pencil out by working with willing cities and counties to acquire market-rate properties using bond financing. Catalyst charges a fee for its services and gets paid to manage the asset for the term of the bond. Once the bond is paid off, the jurisdiction takes ownership of the property.

Catalyst was founded in 2019 by Jordan Moss, who grew up in Sausalito and Mill Valley and has social ties to Marin City. Moss could not be reached for comment.

In 2021, Catalyst provided the Essential Housing Fund with $100,000 to help provide rental subsidies to teachers in the Sausalito Marin City School District.

A blog posting on Catalyst’s website — titled “Essential Housing as a Blueprint for Housing Innovation” — says: “By some estimates, California lost over 20,000 affordable units to expiring regulatory restrictions since 1997 and stands to lose nearly 33,000 over the next decade.”

Prior to his departure this month, Logan oversaw the foundation’s discretionary grant making through the Buck Fund as well as the foundation’s Community First Loan Fund, which provided loans to nonprofits.

“Johnathan Logan’s departure from MCF is bittersweet,” said Rhea Suh, the foundation’s chief executive. “While we lose a great leader within the institution, the community gains a great advocate for affordable housing — that works for all communities.”

“The initiative he is launching couldn’t be more urgent or necessary,” Suh said, “and demonstrates our commitment to identify projects which have the opportunity to make impact at scale.”