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• Do community land trusts work? What does the research show?
• Do CLT homes stay affordable when they are resold?
• Do CLT homeowners build wealth?
• Do CLT homeowners keep their homes?
• How do CLTs measure success?
• What are the downsides of community land trusts?

Do community land trusts work? What does the research show?

It depends what we ask a CLT to do. Its main promises are to keep homes affordable from one buyer to the next, to help lower-income households buy homes and keep them, to let those households build some wealth, and to protect neighborhoods from displacement. On each of these, the evidence is encouraging, and on the first two it is strong.

Two studies are the best known. The first followed every resale of the Champlain Housing Trust’s homes in Burlington, Vermont, over 20 years and found that the homes stayed affordable, that owners built wealth, and that most sellers went on to buy homes on the open market. The second, a national survey during the 2008 to 2009 foreclosure crisis, found that CLT homeowners were far less likely than other homeowners to fall seriously behind or lose their homes.

More recent research on shared equity homeownership, of which CLTs are the best-known form, points the same way. Studies have found that these programs improve access to homeownership and residential stability, help owners build assets, and reduce mortgage debt, and a study of CLT neighborhoods found evidence that CLTs can slow gentrification.

There are limits to what we know. Most studies are of U.S. CLTs and of homeownership; less is known about CLT rental housing, farms and commercial space, and very little has been measured yet for CLTs in Europe or the Global South. Some studies rely on CLTs that chose to respond to surveys. The movement is growing faster than the research about it.

Sources

• John Emmeus Davis and Alice Stokes, Lands in Trust, Homes That Last: A Performance Evaluation of the Champlain Housing Trust (Burlington, VT: Champlain Housing Trust, 2009). Covers all 205 resales of the trust’s homes, 1988–2008.
• Emily Thaden and Greg Rosenberg, “Outperforming the Market: Delinquency and Foreclosure Rates in Community Land Trusts,” Land Lines (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy), October 2010. Based on the National CLT Network’s 2009 delinquency and foreclosure survey.
• Ruoniu Wang, Claire Cahen, Arthur Acolin and Rebecca J. Walter, “Tracking Growth and Evaluating Performance of Shared Equity Homeownership Programs During Housing Market Fluctuations,” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy working paper (2019).
• Arthur Acolin, Alex Ramiller, Rebecca J. Walter, Sarah Thompson and Ruoniu Wang, “Transitioning to Homeownership: Asset Building for Low- and Moderate-Income Households,” Housing Policy Debate 31, no. 6 (2021).
• Brett Theodos, Christina Plerhoples Stacy, Breno Braga and Rob Daniels, “Affordable Homeownership: An Evaluation of the Near-Term Effects of Shared Equity Programs,” Housing Policy Debate 29, no. 6 (2019).
• Myungshik Choi, Shannon Van Zandt and David Matarrita-Cascante, “Can Community Land Trusts Slow Gentrification?” Journal of Urban Affairs 40, no. 3 (2018).
• Research summary in Ruoniu (Vince) Wang and others, “The 2022 Census of Community Land Trusts and Shared Equity Entities in the United States,” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy working paper WP23RW1 (2023). Covers shared equity programs generally, not only CLTs.

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Do CLT homes stay affordable when they are resold?

Yes. This is the CLT’s central promise, and the best evidence comes from the Champlain Housing Trust, which tracked all 205 resales of its homes between 1988 and 2008. During the housing boom from 1999 to 2006, the median price of homes in the Burlington area rose 85 percent; the median price of Champlain homes resold in the same years rose 35 percent.

The study asked two questions: was each home still affordable to a household like the one that first bought it, and was it more or less affordable than before? On average, Champlain’s homes became slightly more affordable on resale, by about 5.65 percent, after accounting for incomes, interest rates, lease fees, taxes and insurance.

This matters for public budgets. Because the subsidy stays in the home, public money is used once and serves buyer after buyer. An initial public investment of about $2.2 million in the Champlain homes that resold helped 357 lower-income households buy homes. Serving the same households with grants that left with each seller would have cost five times as much. A U.S. survey of shared equity programs found that 98 percent keep their homes affordable for 30 years or longer, many permanently.

Sources

• John Emmeus Davis and Alice Stokes, Lands in Trust, Homes That Last: A Performance Evaluation of the Champlain Housing Trust (Burlington, VT: Champlain Housing Trust, 2009). Covers all 205 resales of the trust’s homes, 1988–2008.
• Ruoniu (Vince) Wang and others, “The 2022 Census of Community Land Trusts and Shared Equity Entities in the United States,” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy working paper WP23RW1 (2023). Covers shared equity programs generally, not only CLTs.
• John Emmeus Davis and Kristin King-Ries, Preserving Affordable Homeownership: Municipal Partnerships with Community Land Trusts (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2024). See Joint Publications.

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Do CLT homeowners build wealth?

Yes, though less than they would from an unrestricted home in a rising market. In the Champlain study, the average owner sold after about five and a half years, got back a down payment of about $2,300, and walked away with nearly $12,000 in additional equity from paying down the mortgage and their share of rising value. Owners who made major improvements received more.

The comparison depends on what you compare with. In the study’s example of an $80,000 home resold after six years in a rising market, an unrestricted owner would have gained about $37,800 and the CLT owner about $13,100. But most CLT buyers could not have bought an unrestricted home at all. Against renting, which would have returned only a security deposit, or investing the down payment in a stock fund, which would have earned about $2,100, the CLT home did far better. In a flat market, the CLT owner’s rate of return can even exceed the market-rate owner’s.

Many owners used that equity to move on. Of the Champlain sellers whose next home was known, 67 percent bought a market-rate home within six months, and about 6 percent bought another CLT home. More recent research on shared equity programs has also found that owners build assets and move into homeownership more successfully than similar households.

Sources

• John Emmeus Davis and Alice Stokes, Lands in Trust, Homes That Last: A Performance Evaluation of the Champlain Housing Trust (Burlington, VT: Champlain Housing Trust, 2009). Covers all 205 resales of the trust’s homes, 1988–2008.
• Arthur Acolin, Alex Ramiller, Rebecca J. Walter, Sarah Thompson and Ruoniu Wang, “Transitioning to Homeownership: Asset Building for Low- and Moderate-Income Households,” Housing Policy Debate 31, no. 6 (2021).
• Ruoniu Wang, Claire Cahen, Arthur Acolin and Rebecca J. Walter, “Tracking Growth and Evaluating Performance of Shared Equity Homeownership Programs During Housing Market Fluctuations,” Lincoln Institute of Land Policy working paper (2019).

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Do CLT homeowners keep their homes?

At much higher rates than other homeowners. In early 2010, the National Community Land Trust Network surveyed CLTs about their homeowners’ mortgages; 42 CLTs in 22 states, with 2,173 mortgaged homes, provided data. At the end of 2009, at the height of the foreclosure crisis, 0.56 percent of CLT mortgages were in foreclosure, compared with 3.31 percent of prime loans, 15.58 percent of subprime loans and 4.58 percent of all loans nationally. Only 1.62 percent of CLT mortgages were seriously delinquent, compared with 7.01 percent of prime loans. Conventional loans were about eight times more likely to be in foreclosure.

The reason is stewardship. CLTs prepare buyers with homebuyer education, steer them toward safe, fixed-rate mortgages and away from predatory loans, and step in early when an owner falls behind. CLTs cured about half of the serious delinquencies that arose in 2009. And because the CLT owns the land, its ground lease gives it the right to cure a default or buy the home before a lender forecloses, so the home stays affordable even if a family cannot keep it.

One caution: the survey covered the CLTs that chose to respond, about a quarter of those invited. The findings match what CLTs report elsewhere, including the Champlain study, in which only nine of 410 homes were resold because of foreclosure over 20 years.

Sources

• Emily Thaden and Greg Rosenberg, “Outperforming the Market: Delinquency and Foreclosure Rates in Community Land Trusts,” Land Lines (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy), October 2010. Based on the National CLT Network’s 2009 delinquency and foreclosure survey.
• John Emmeus Davis and Alice Stokes, Lands in Trust, Homes That Last: A Performance Evaluation of the Champlain Housing Trust (Burlington, VT: Champlain Housing Trust, 2009). Covers all 205 resales of the trust’s homes, 1988–2008.

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How do CLTs measure success?

Each CLT measures what matters to its community, but most track a common set of results: how many homes and acres they hold; whether homes stay affordable over many resales; how long owners stay, and how many go on to buy elsewhere; what owners gain when they sell; delinquency and foreclosure rates; and the condition of their buildings.

The Champlain study offers a model for the hardest question, whether homes stay affordable. It measured each home’s affordability both against the household that first bought it and against a fixed standard, a household earning 80 percent of the area median income spending no more than 30 percent of its income on housing.

Many CLTs also try to measure things that are harder to count: resident participation and leadership, community control of land, and whether people at risk of displacement were able to stay. European CLTs developed a Social Impact Tool for this purpose, available on our Manuals and Guides page. The CLT Center’s impact reports describe the movement’s growth worldwide.

Tracking data across many CLTs. In the United States, many CLTs and other shared equity programs keep records of their homes, buyers and resales in HomeKeeper, a data management system offered by Grounded Solutions Network and built on the Salesforce platform. Programs that use it can share their data through the HomeKeeper National Data Hub, which has made it possible to look at the field as a whole. A 2019 study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, produced with Grounded Solutions, drew on that data for more than 4,000 homes in 58 programs across 20 states over three decades. It found that 95 percent of shared equity mortgages were affordable to households earning under 80 percent of the area median income; that the median household built about $14,000 in wealth on an initial investment of about $1,875; and that most owners who moved went on to buy another home.

HomeKeeper is a paid service with a one-time setup fee and an annual subscription, and it takes staff time to set up and keep current, so smaller CLTs weigh it against simpler tools such as spreadsheets. Whatever the tool, the CLTs that can show their results most clearly are the ones that record each sale and resale consistently from the start.

Sources

• John Emmeus Davis and Alice Stokes, Lands in Trust, Homes That Last: A Performance Evaluation of the Champlain Housing Trust (Burlington, VT: Champlain Housing Trust, 2009). Covers all 205 resales of the trust’s homes, 1988–2008.
• Social Impact Tool for CLTs, Sustainable Housing for Inclusive and Cohesive Cities project. See Manuals and Guides.
• Grounded Solutions Network, “New Study Evaluates Shared Equity Housing Program Performance, Nationwide Impact” (2019), and HomeKeeper (myhomekeeper.org).
• Ruoniu Wang, Claire Cahen, Arthur Acolin and Rebecca J. Walter, Tracking Growth and Evaluating Performance of Shared Equity Homeownership Programs During Housing Market Fluctuations, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy working paper (2019).

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What are the downsides of community land trusts?

For homeowners, the main trade-off is equity. A CLT owner sells at an affordable price, not the market price, so in a rising market they gain much less than the owner of an unrestricted home would. They also share some decisions with the CLT, such as subletting, refinancing and major changes to the home. Resales can be slow when the market cools; Champlain’s condominium resales took longer than six months during a slump in the 1990s, and it eventually let a dozen hard-to-sell units convert to market-rate housing.

For CLTs, the hardest problems are scale and money. Land is expensive, subsidies are limited, and many CLTs remain small. Paying for stewardship over decades is a constant struggle. Lenders, appraisers and tax assessors may be unfamiliar with ground leases, though this has improved; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now have CLT mortgage products. Even so, under Fannie Mae’s rules a home’s resale restrictions end if the lender forecloses, which is one reason CLTs work so hard to prevent foreclosure.

For the model itself, there are real tensions: between letting today’s owners build wealth and keeping homes affordable for tomorrow’s, between growing fast and staying rooted in and accountable to the community, and, for CLTs that go beyond housing, between serving community needs and taking on financial risks, such as vacant commercial space. Good CLTs face these questions openly, and the answers differ from place to place.

Sources

• John Emmeus Davis and Alice Stokes, Lands in Trust, Homes That Last: A Performance Evaluation of the Champlain Housing Trust (Burlington, VT: Champlain Housing Trust, 2009). Covers all 205 resales of the trust’s homes, 1988–2008.
• Fannie Mae, Community Land Trust Frequently Asked Questions (February 2026).
• John Emmeus Davis and Kristin King-Ries, Preserving Affordable Homeownership: Municipal Partnerships with Community Land Trusts (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2024). See Joint Publications.
• Greg Rosenberg and Jeffrey Yuen, Beyond Housing: Urban Agriculture and Commercial Development by Community Land Trusts, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy working paper WP13GR1 (2012).

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