Suttons Bay Schools finalized a deal earlier this month to sell almost a quarter of its property to a community land trust.
Peninsula Housing, the community land trust that operates within Leelanau County, will buy 9.5 of the school’s 40 acres, and plans to develop attainable housing there.
Those 9.5 acres consist of a gravel parking lot, two baseball and softball fields, and a soccer field. Altogether, Suttons Bay Superintendent Casey Petz said it cost over $150,000 per year to maintain the part of the property that they just sold.
The property closed for $800,000.
“We don't need more campus,” Petz said. “We don't need more parking lots or open space. Our campus was designed for up to 1,500 kids…. We had 500 in the fall of 2024.”
Instead, students will use a different set of fields closer to their school buildings. Those fields are getting a big upgrade thanks to a 2024 bond.
There’s one quirk in the deal — Suttons Bay Schools will lease back the property they just sold for a period of three years, while the other set of fields are renovated.
Petz said students may shuffle back and forth between the farther fields and the closer ones, but that there won’t be any impact on the sports or physical education classes they are able to offer.
He said the point of the sale is to “right-size” the campus, and to support bringing cheaper homes to Leelanau County, where the median home value is 4.5 times median annual income in 2024, according to MLive.
Most families "want to see us on a stable track financially now and well into the future," Petz said. "They also understand the unique dynamics of a county like Leelanau, a very hard place to live especially if you work a regular person job."
Larry Mawby, president of Peninsula Housing, said the next steps on their end are first to raise money to pay back the loans they took to buy the property, and second to work with the county on changing the property’s zoning and building out the right infrastructure for housing development.
“There’s a lot of work that’s needed, and we’ll undoubtedly be doing a public input process,” said Mawby.
Though Peninsula Housing provided all the funds, they will co-own the property alongside the county land bank for the time being, which will keep the land in partial public ownership and keep the property taxes at zero percent. Eventually, the plan is for Peninsula Housing to be the sole owner.
Community land trusts permanently own land and sell just the buildings on them, lowering the price of home ownership and limiting resale prices.
“I really do believe that the larger community recognizes that housing for people who are working in the community is a crisis in Leelanau County,” Mawby said.
