Community Land Trusts for a Just Housing Future
Amanda Lynn
Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are gaining increasing attention as a solution for the extreme challenges we face in providing decent, safe and economically sound housing. CLTs function as non-profit, community based organizations providing a unique opportunity for thoughtful, autonomous communities with long term affordability. The primary mechanism they use to create affordability is separation of the value of a home from the land it sits on. The land goes into a trust, and the home gets re-sold as a separate entity, usually with some covenant around affordability. Low- and middle- income folks who live in community land trusts have a say in what goes on with the land, plus access to home-ownership and housing stability. The first CLT in the United States, New Communities, was started by civil rights activists to increase access to housing and land for Black families in the south during the Jim Crow era. Today, this approach to housing and community development is continuing to shift the paradigm around home ownership.
The model can successfully address a variety of needs, from environmental sustainability to social equity. CLTs have shared values around ensuring a community’s access to affordable housing in perpetuity, regardless of market fluctuation and larger economic upheaval. They’ve been shown to increase overall access to home-ownership both within the land trusts themselves and on the traditional market. Perhaps even more appealing are the significant results CLTs have shown around helping people ride out unstable housing markets and foreclosures. After the 2008 crash, foreclosure rates demonstrated the way CLTs offer their members the ability to maintain and preserve their affordable housing, even through a deep recession. Some research has demonstrated that community land trusts were 10x less likely to foreclose than traditional mortgages.
Homeowners in CLTs are able to earn competitive returns while keeping properties affordable to lower-income buyers over time. After purchasing a home in a CLT, many first time homebuyers graduate to the traditional market with adequate proceeds, while still being able to provide another family in need with a pathway to a home. Currently, CLTs are massively under-utilized as a tool that can improve our communities and housing landscape.
Amid the COVID-19 crisis, our housing crisis has continued to explode and more than ever we’re seeing the results of the crunch. The latest data found a shortage of 6.8 million affordable and available rental units. Put another way, that’s 37 homes for every 100 households who need them. And that’s before the effects of the pandemic. Today, 70% of low-income renters spend over half their income on housing. Our working class neighbors and elders are suffering. Over a third of low-income renters are active in the labor force, with 77% working over 20hrs/week. Another third are seniors, and 25% of low-income renters have a disabled person in the household. By moving eligible families towards home ownership, CLTs help decrease the strain on an overburdened rental market.
Further, CLTs have the potential to address longstanding inequities that drive compounding housing challenges for Black and Indigenous communities. The predominant method of gaining wealth in the United States (at least for the middle class) is through real estate, and our history of racial housing discrimination has left its mark. Today in the U.S., a Black family is 30% less likely to own a home than a white family; this is rooted in the expansive wealth gap between the two groups. According to 2019 data from American Progress, the average wealth of a white, college educated household is still nearly 7x that of a Black, college educated household — and the wealth gap between the two groups steadily widened during the pandemic at all income levels. Working class communities, communities of color, and other groups at the margins have a deep need for solidity, wide opportunity, and self-reliance. CLTs can offer exactly that through remedying historical damage around housing access and creating sustainable, safe communities for the long haul.
We know the wider public health and long term impacts of housing insecurity for families. We know we need creative, well thought out solutions that truly empower communities. CLTs offer a unique opportunity to provide and empower low- and middle-income people to build the neighborhoods they want, then preserve them across generations.
The biggest challenge in implementing the model extensively enough to meet current needs is steering a major cultural shift around how we do community development. CLTs require political support that can vary widely by region based on the level of cultural opposition to shared land ownership. There is significant work to be done around building knowledge of the benefits of CLTs before we start seeing them at scale, especially considering how deeply ingrained values around individual land ownership are within U.S. society. Building an acceptable level of readiness is the slog ahead. Regardless of these challenges, there is substantive value in doing the work it will take to build land trusts because of the effects they can have.
At a time when we desperately need mechanisms that will ensure housing affordability across generations, steward land, and skew power dynamics around housing into the hands of communities, CLTs provide an elegant solution. The question is whether there is a level of enthusiasm and agreement to make them widespread enough, fast enough, to have a significant impact on the overall housing landscape of the United States.
