Community land trust

Based on Wikipedia: Community land trust

In 1969, a group of civil rights organizers in rural Georgia did something radical. They bought 5,000 acres of farmland near Albany and created what would become one of the largest Black-owned landholdings in America. Their idea was simple but revolutionary: what if the community owned the land collectively, while individual families owned their homes and farmed their plots? What if land itself could be removed from the speculative market that had kept Black farmers poor and landless for generations?

They called it New Communities, Inc. And though a drought and discriminatory federal lending practices would eventually force them to lose that land, the model they pioneered would spread across the United States and eventually the world.

This is the story of community land trusts—a deceptively simple legal innovation that separates who owns the dirt from who owns the house on top of it.

The Core Idea: Splitting Land from Buildings

Here's the puzzle that community land trusts solve. When you buy a house in most places, you're actually buying two things bundled together: the building itself and the land beneath it. Over time, especially in desirable areas, the land appreciates far faster than the structure. A modest bungalow in San Francisco might sit on land worth millions. The building could be worth almost nothing—it's the location that commands the price.

This creates a brutal dynamic for affordable housing. A nonprofit or government agency might spend $100,000 to help a low-income family buy their first home. But when that family sells twenty years later, they pocket a windfall profit from land appreciation. The next family needs an even larger subsidy. The public investment evaporates into private hands, and the cycle repeats.

Community land trusts break this cycle by splitting the bundle.

The trust—typically a nonprofit corporation—owns the land permanently. Homeowners purchase their houses and receive a long-term lease on the ground beneath them, often lasting 99 years. They build equity in their homes, but the land remains in community hands. When they sell, resale formulas built into the lease ensure the home stays affordable for the next buyer.

It's ownership, but with guardrails. The homeowner gets stability, a stake, and a modest return on their investment. But the community's investment in affordability persists across generations rather than disappearing with a single sale.

Where This Idea Came From

The community land trust didn't emerge from nowhere. Its intellectual roots stretch back through a century of experiments in separating land from buildings.

In late Victorian England, a stenographer named Ebenezer Howard grew horrified by London's slums and the rural poverty driving people into them. His solution, laid out in his 1898 book "To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform," was the garden city: planned communities that would capture rising land values for public benefit rather than private landlords. Howard's ideas led to actual towns—Letchworth and Welwyn in England—built on land held in trust for residents.

Meanwhile, in British-controlled Palestine, Jewish settlers were building agricultural communities on land owned by the Jewish National Fund, which leased parcels to kibbutzim and moshavim. The fund retained ownership; residents held long-term leases. This structure allowed collective control over who could access land while still permitting individual households or cooperatives to farm and build.

In India, a different experiment was unfolding. After independence, the spiritual leader Vinoba Bhave walked across the subcontinent asking wealthy landowners to donate portions of their holdings to the landless poor. This Bhoodan, or "land-gift," movement evolved into Gramdan, whole "village-gift" communities where land was held collectively. An American social theorist named Ralph Borsodi, who had run his own experiments with leased-land communities in the United States since the 1930s, traveled to India and worked with Bhave and the socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan.

When Borsodi returned to America, he brought back lessons from Gramdan. In 1967, he joined with a younger economist named Robert Swann to form the International Independence Institute, later renamed the Institute for Community Economics. They wanted to create an American version of community-held land.

Civil Rights and Black Land Ownership

The connection between land and liberation was visceral for Black Americans in the rural South. For formerly enslaved people and their descendants, owning land meant freedom from the sharecropping system that kept them in perpetual debt to white landowners. It meant economic independence, political power, and physical safety.

It also made you a target.

Charles Sherrod knew this intimately. As a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he had spent years organizing voter registration in southwest Georgia, one of the most dangerous regions for civil rights work. He understood that political rights meant little without economic independence, and economic independence required land.

In 1969, Sherrod and his wife Shirley, along with Slater King (cousin of Martin Luther King Jr.) and other organizers, incorporated New Communities, Inc. They raised money from churches and foundations, bought 5,000 acres of farmland, and began building a community where Black families could own homes on collectively held land, work cooperative farms, and escape the economic stranglehold of white-controlled credit markets.

For a decade, New Communities thrived. Then came a devastating drought. The Sherrods applied for emergency loans from the United States Department of Agriculture, the same loans routinely approved for white farmers. They were denied.

Without credit to bridge the crisis, New Communities lost its land in the early 1980s.

Decades later, the Pigford v. Glickman class-action lawsuit exposed systematic discrimination by the USDA against Black farmers. Arbitrators found that New Communities had been specifically targeted. In 2009, the organization received approximately $12.8 million in damages. Shirley Sherrod, by then a USDA official herself, used part of the settlement to help New Communities purchase new farmland in Georgia.

But by then, the model they had pioneered had already transformed affordable housing across America.

The Classic Community Land Trust Structure

In 1972, the Institute for Community Economics published a manual called "The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America." Written by Robert Swann and colleagues, it codified what would become known as the "classic" community land trust structure.

Three features defined this model.

First, the trust would be a nonprofit, membership-based organization serving a defined geographic community. Anyone living on trust land and anyone living or working in the surrounding area could become a voting member.

Second, governance would follow a tripartite board structure. One-third of board seats would go to leaseholders—the people actually living on trust land. Another third would go to community residents who lived nearby but not on trust property. The final third would be filled by public officials, nonprofit representatives, or subject-matter experts.

This design was intentional. Leaseholders have direct stakes in how the trust operates—they want their homes maintained, their equity protected, their communities stable. But they might also want to maximize their own resale profits, which could undermine long-term affordability. Community residents represent the broader public interest in keeping housing affordable for future generations. And outside experts bring technical knowledge about housing finance, legal structures, and real estate markets.

The tripartite board forces these constituencies to negotiate with each other, preventing any single interest from dominating.

Third, the trust would use ground leases—typically 99-year renewable leases—that separated land ownership from building ownership. The lease would include resale formulas limiting how much equity homeowners could capture when selling, ensuring homes remained affordable to subsequent buyers.

This wasn't the only way to structure a community land trust, and many organizations have adapted the model since. Some CLTs operate as programs within larger housing nonprofits. Others are created by local governments with appointed rather than elected boards. But the core innovation—community-owned land with long-term affordability restrictions—remained consistent.

From Rural Experiment to Urban Necessity

New Communities was rural, built to serve Black farmers. But by the 1980s, a different crisis was emerging in American cities.

Decades of disinvestment had hollowed out urban neighborhoods. Redlining—the practice of denying mortgages to residents of predominantly Black and immigrant neighborhoods—had starved these communities of capital. Factories closed. Middle-class families fled to suburbs. Housing deteriorated. Vacant lots multiplied.

Then came gentrification.

As some urban neighborhoods became attractive again to young professionals and developers, housing prices began to climb. The same communities that had suffered from abandonment now faced displacement. Long-term residents who had weathered the hard years found themselves priced out just as their neighborhoods improved.

Community land trusts offered a tool for neighborhood self-defense.

The Community Land Cooperative of Cincinnati, founded in 1980 or 1981 (sources differ slightly), is generally considered the first urban community land trust in America. It took the model developed for rural Georgia and applied it to inner-city neighborhoods facing speculative pressure.

But the most influential urban CLT emerged in Burlington, Vermont.

The Burlington Experiment

In 1984, Burlington was a small city with a big housing problem. A tight rental market, gentrification pressure from the University of Vermont, and rising property values were squeezing low- and moderate-income residents. The city's young mayor, a democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders, wanted to do something about it.

Working with city housing staff and community organizers, Sanders's administration helped establish the Burlington Community Land Trust. Unlike some CLTs that emerged from grassroots activism in opposition to city hall, Burlington's CLT was created in partnership with municipal government. The city provided startup funding, donated land, and committed ongoing support.

This partnership model proved remarkably effective. Over the following decades, the Burlington CLT grew steadily, acquiring land throughout the city and placing permanently affordable homes on it. In 2006, it merged with a local nonprofit housing developer to form the Champlain Housing Trust, which now stewards thousands of homes across Burlington and surrounding communities.

Champlain Housing Trust became a proof of concept, demonstrating that community land trusts could operate at meaningful scale in American cities. Researchers studied its outcomes intensively. The findings were striking: CLT homeowners defaulted on mortgages at a fraction of the rate of conventional homeowners, even during the 2008 financial crisis. The resale restrictions worked—homes remained affordable across multiple sales. And because the trust maintained ongoing relationships with homeowners, providing financial counseling and intervening early when families faced difficulty, foreclosures stayed rare.

The trust had turned housing from a speculative asset into something more like durable infrastructure.

Dudley Street and the Power of Eminent Domain

Not every urban CLT had friendly relations with local government. Some emerged from fierce neighborhood opposition to official plans.

Boston's Dudley Street neighborhood, spanning parts of Roxbury and North Dorchester, had been devastated by arson, abandonment, and failed urban renewal schemes by the late 1980s. Vacant lots covered nearly a third of the area. The city had plans for redevelopment, but residents—predominantly Black, Latino, and Cape Verdean—had learned to distrust top-down planning that displaced longtime communities.

In 1984, residents formed the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative to take control of their community's future. They developed their own comprehensive plan, organized intense political pressure, and won something unprecedented: the city granted their community land trust, Dudley Neighbors Inc., limited eminent domain authority.

Eminent domain is the government's power to take private property for public use. Normally only government agencies wield this power. But Boston delegated a portion of it to a community organization. Dudley Neighbors could now assemble the scattered vacant parcels that private speculators might otherwise have bought and flipped, converting them into permanently affordable housing and community facilities.

The Dudley Street story illustrated both the potential and the political difficulty of community land trusts. Getting that eminent domain authority required years of sophisticated organizing and a supportive political moment. Most communities couldn't replicate it. But the example demonstrated what became possible when neighborhoods gained genuine control over land.

How Affordability Stays Permanent

The mechanics of permanent affordability deserve closer examination, because they represent the community land trust's most distinctive contribution to housing policy.

Traditional affordable housing programs typically work through one-time subsidies. A government agency or nonprofit provides down payment assistance, below-market financing, or a reduced purchase price. The family buys a home. Years later, they sell at market rate, pocket the appreciation, and the affordable unit is gone. The next family needs fresh subsidy.

This model has a name in housing policy: "expiring affordability."

Community land trusts create "permanent affordability" instead. Here's how it works in practice.

A family purchases a home on CLT land for $150,000, significantly below the market rate in their area. They put down $10,000 and take a $140,000 mortgage. The trust helped bridge the gap between the market price and what the family could afford, perhaps using public subsidy, donated land, or its own resources.

The family lives in the home for fifteen years. They pay their mortgage, maintain the property, build equity. When they decide to sell, the ground lease kicks in.

Their resale formula might allow them to capture 25% of the appreciation, or a fixed annual return like 2% per year, or some other arrangement designed to reward homeownership while preserving affordability. They can't simply sell on the open market for whatever someone will pay. They must sell to another income-qualified buyer at a price set by the formula.

If comparable market-rate homes in their neighborhood now sell for $350,000, the CLT home might resell for perhaps $180,000—still a meaningful gain for the seller, but still affordable to the next family. The original subsidy doesn't disappear. It persists through sale after sale, potentially for generations.

This structure creates what advocates call "stewardship." The trust doesn't just facilitate the initial sale and walk away. It monitors lease compliance, ensures homes are maintained, provides counseling when homeowners face financial trouble, and coordinates with lenders to prevent foreclosures. When a home is sold, the trust approves the buyer, ensures the resale price follows the formula, and begins the stewardship relationship with the new owner.

Critics argue these restrictions make CLT homeownership less attractive than conventional homeownership. You can't capture full appreciation. You can't sell to anyone you want. You're in an ongoing relationship with a nonprofit organization that has authority over certain aspects of your property.

Advocates counter that for families priced out of conventional homeownership entirely, these tradeoffs are worthwhile. A home with restricted appreciation beats renting forever. And the restrictions that limit individual wealth-building are precisely what make the opportunity available at all.

Beyond Homeownership

Although permanently affordable homeownership became the dominant use case for community land trusts in America, the model has always been more flexible.

Some CLTs own land for rental housing, placing apartment buildings on trust property with long-term commitments to affordability. Others support community gardens, providing secure tenure for urban agriculture that might otherwise be displaced by development. Commercial space—small business incubators, nonprofit offices, community facilities—can sit on CLT land too.

This versatility reflects the underlying insight: the community land trust is fundamentally a tool for community control of land, not specifically a homeownership program. What goes on that land depends on what the community decides.

The Global Spread

By the 2020s, community land trusts had spread far beyond their American origins.

In England and Wales, the Housing and Regeneration Act of 2008 gave community land trusts a statutory definition, recognizing them as local organizations holding land for community benefit. British CLTs often emerged in response to the same pressures driving the American movement: unaffordable housing, speculative development, and displacement of longtime residents. By 2019, more than 250 CLTs operated in England and Wales, with thousands of members and hundreds of completed homes.

But the English model had different roots and sometimes different purposes than its American counterpart. Some rural English CLTs formed primarily to preserve village character and ensure local workers could afford to live where they worked—concerns that could tip toward exclusion rather than inclusion if not carefully managed.

Scotland developed its own distinct tradition. Through land reform legislation, community trusts have acquired large estates from private landowners—not just individual parcels but vast rural holdings. By the early 2020s, organizations affiliated with Community Land Scotland collectively owned or managed over 500,000 acres, home to more than 25,000 people. This resembles community land trusts but operates at a completely different scale, more like community ownership of entire regions than individual urban lots.

European cities have experimented with the model too. Brussels, Lille, and Ghent have established community land trusts, often supported by European Union programs promoting citizen-led development. Belgium and the Netherlands have formed national CLT networks.

In Australia, researchers and policymakers have explored community land trusts as one option for addressing housing affordability in Sydney, Melbourne, and other high-cost cities. New Zealand has examined CLTs for potential application with Māori communities facing housing insecurity.

Perhaps most intriguingly, CLT-inspired initiatives have emerged in Kenya and other African countries, where community ownership and long-term leasing might improve security of tenure in informal settlements—the massive unplanned neighborhoods where millions of urban Africans live without clear legal rights to their land.

Each adaptation reflects local legal systems, housing markets, and community organizing traditions. What works in Vermont doesn't translate directly to Brussels or Nairobi. But the core idea—separating land ownership from building ownership to preserve community assets—crosses borders.

The Numbers Today

A 2024 survey cited by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy counted more than 300 community land trusts in the United States: 308 CLTs in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. That's up from 289 in 2021.

Three hundred organizations might sound modest for a nation of 330 million people. But community land trusts aren't meant to scale like conventional housing programs. They're inherently local, rooted in specific communities, governed by neighbors. National networks like Grounded Solutions Network and the Center for Community Land Trust Innovation provide technical assistance and track the movement, but each CLT remains a distinct entity tied to its place.

Some have grown large. Champlain Housing Trust in Vermont stewards thousands of homes. But many CLTs hold just dozens of units, perhaps in a single neighborhood. The model's strength lies partly in this embeddedness—these organizations know their communities intimately, maintain long-term relationships with homeowners, and make decisions based on local conditions rather than distant policy.

What Community Land Trusts Are Not

Understanding what community land trusts actually are requires understanding what they're not.

They're not public housing. The trust may be a nonprofit, but homeowners own their homes. They have mortgages, build equity, make decisions about their properties. The relationship resembles homeownership more than tenancy, even though the land remains in community hands.

They're not housing cooperatives, though the two can complement each other. A cooperative might own a building collectively, with residents holding shares. A community land trust might own the land beneath that cooperative, adding another layer of community control. But the structures are distinct.

They're not land banks, though the two sometimes work together. Land banks are typically government entities that acquire and manage vacant or abandoned properties to return them to productive use. A land bank might transfer parcels to a community land trust for permanent affordable housing, but the organizations have different purposes and legal forms.

They're not simply deed restrictions or affordability covenants, though they use similar mechanisms. Many affordable housing programs attach deed restrictions requiring owner-occupancy or limiting resale prices. But these restrictions often have expiration dates, and no organization monitors compliance or maintains relationships with homeowners. Community land trusts bundle the restrictions with ongoing stewardship and democratic governance—the trust isn't just a legal constraint but a membership organization with a physical presence in the community.

The Tensions Within

Community land trusts navigate real tensions that don't have easy resolutions.

There's the tension between individual wealth-building and community benefit. American housing policy has long used homeownership as a vehicle for family wealth accumulation. Community land trusts deliberately limit this accumulation to preserve affordability. That's a genuine tradeoff, not a free lunch. CLT homeowners trade potential windfalls for access and stability.

There's the tension between local control and adequate resources. Community land trusts work best with strong local governance—neighbors making decisions about their neighborhood. But acquiring and developing land requires capital that small grassroots organizations may lack. Many successful CLTs rely heavily on public subsidy, donated land, or partnerships with larger institutions. This support enables growth but can shift power away from community members.

There's the tension between permanent affordability and household mobility. Some critics argue that resale restrictions trap families in place, preventing them from moving to better opportunities elsewhere. If you can't capture full appreciation, you may not build enough equity for a down payment on your next home in a different city. Advocates counter that for families who would otherwise rent forever, this constraint is acceptable—and that stable communities have value beyond individual household mobility.

And there's the tension between inclusion and neighborhood preservation. Community land trusts emerged partly from the civil rights movement and remain committed to racial and economic inclusion. But the same tools that prevent displacement of longtime residents can potentially be used to exclude newcomers or preserve neighborhood character in less progressive ways. Who counts as "the community" that controls the land?

The Deeper Question

Behind community land trusts lies a question that American society has never fully resolved: should land be a commodity like any other, bought and sold for maximum profit, or is it something more fundamental—a common inheritance that communities have legitimate interests in governing?

The conventional view treats land as property pure and simple. You buy it, you own it, you profit from it. If rising demand makes your land more valuable, that's your windfall to capture. The market allocates land to highest-value uses. Individuals pursue their interests. Communities emerge from the sum of individual choices.

Community land trusts embody a different view. They treat land as a community asset that should serve community purposes across generations. Individual households can use land and build equity in improvements, but the land itself belongs to the collective. The community—through its elected representatives on the trust board—decides how land serves the common good.

This isn't a new debate. Henry George argued in the 19th century that rising land values represented unearned increment that belonged to the community, not individual landowners. Ebenezer Howard built garden cities on this principle. The Jewish National Fund in Palestine, the Gramdan villages in India, and indigenous land tenure systems around the world have all grappled with similar questions about the relationship between individual use and collective ownership.

Community land trusts offer one practical answer: keep the land in trust, let individuals own the buildings. It's a compromise between pure private property and pure collective ownership, designed to work within American legal and financial systems while preserving community control over a fundamental resource.

Whether that compromise can scale—whether community land trusts can move from thousands of homes to hundreds of thousands, from neighborhood experiments to significant market share—remains an open question. But fifty-five years after Charles Sherrod and his fellow organizers bought that farmland in Georgia, the model they helped create continues to spread, adapt, and provoke thought about who land is really for.