Housing is certainly a big, big topic. It guides council elections and it guides the will of our community. We are just in the process now of tabling a final community needs assessment, and housing is certainly part of that. So our council is focusing on meeting the housing needs.
What we have looked at in the past--and we see it across Canada--is that while housing needs are there, first nation communities like ourselves can't be the full risk-taker. We've seen that. I believe that the full 25% to 30% of the problems in Canada with housing are, where first nations are involved, in the CMHC housing needs and programs in having to offset the cost of the houses. It's a problem. I've seen first nations where if you guarantee too much at the governmental level to support the housing and if some of your members don't pay enough, it puts that whole program in the red and you're going to have economic problems. There will be spinoffs and it will affect your community services. It will affect whether or not you are viable as an entity and all those things.
So for us, we've looked at ways to counter that. We try to provide mortgage financing and have empowered our band members to actually mortgage themselves. We have created things like the A to A lease. An A to A lease simply allows a band member to create a lease in his or her name, and that lease is signed by him or her as the CP holder, the certificate of possession holder of the property. The banks now will look at that A to A lease and provide financing. It's only available if you're in land management or self-government right now. At least that's up to the present. That is a form of empowering the first nation person to create a mortgage and have a mortgageable financial instrument that allows him or her to build a house.
So for us, when we look at that, that works fine when we have CP lands. I mentioned that 80% of our lands are CP-ed out, where our individuals are empowered with the rights of ownership and they're viewed as if they were fee simple owners. It's a structure that works.
We have other programs such as our overall band subdivisions, where we have CMHC financing, where the band will actually put in the dollars and in some cases rely on the support from CMHC and the guarantees therefrom, and we'll put subdivisions in place. But our policy is one of entrepreneurial ownership. So in those types of subdivisions, what we put ourselves in is when that mortgage is paid off, one by one by one, in band subdivisions, those band members will eventually, for one dollar, at the end of that mortgage payout, then have their houses. Such members become entrepreneurial persons and it's viewed as fee simple.
So that works for us in those situations. In other situations where we have social development, recipients on welfare, those sorts of things, we have band housing, which will always remain band housing. We'll put in fourplexes or sixplexes or sometimes duplexes, and lower-income homes where we need to subsidize, and that will become housing that will never be owned by individual band members. It will always be owned by the band itself.
We have to have a mixture to accommodate the needs of our community.