CLT 101

Frequently asked questions · 8 questions

CLT 101

The basics of community land trusts for people new to them: what a CLT is, how it works, who owns what, and how CLTs differ from other kinds of land trusts and housing.

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What is a community land trust?

A community land trust (CLT) is a nonprofit, community-based organization that owns land on behalf of a community and keeps it out of the speculative market for good. People own the homes, shops or other buildings on that land, while the CLT keeps the land itself and leases it to them for a very long time.

The point is lasting affordability. When a family sells a CLT home, it sells at a price that stays affordable for the next family, and the one after that. Most CLTs are also run with the community: people who live on the land and people from the surrounding neighborhood usually sit on the board. For a fuller introduction, see What Is a Community Land Trust?

Three features define what is often called the “classic” CLT. Ownership: the CLT holds land permanently and leases it for homes and other community uses. Organization: anyone living in the area the CLT serves can usually join, and board seats are typically shared among leaseholders, neighbors and public-interest members. Operation: priority goes to people and places left out of the market, with a lasting commitment to keeping homes affordable and in good repair. Many CLTs adapt one or more of these features to fit local needs.

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How does a community land trust work?

A CLT acquires land, often with help from a city, a foundation or a donor, and holds onto it permanently. It then sells or rents the buildings on that land to people who could not otherwise afford them. Homeowners buy only the house; they lease the land beneath it from the CLT, usually for 99 years.

The lease does two jobs. It gives the homeowner a secure, inheritable right to live there, and it sets the rules that keep the home affordable: who can buy it next and at what price. The CLT stays involved for as long as the lease runs, helping owners keep their homes in good repair and step in if they have trouble with their mortgage. People often call the CLT “the developer that never goes away.”

A typical homeownership sale works like this: public or private money lowers the price to what a lower-income household can afford; the buyer gets a mortgage and buys the house, while leasing the land; and the lease’s resale formula sets the price when the owner later sells, so the next buyer gets the same affordable price. In between, the CLT helps owners with problems and steps in early if they fall behind.

Sources

  • CLT Center, What Is a Community Land Trust?
  • Kirby White, ed., The CLT Technical Manual (National Community Land Trust Network, 2011). See Manuals and Guides.
  • 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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Who owns the land, and who owns the home?

In the classic model, the CLT owns the land and the homeowner owns the house. The homeowner holds a deed to the house and a long-term lease to the land, so they have most of the rights any homeowner has: they can live there as long as they wish, decorate and improve it, and pass it to their heirs.

This varies from place to place. Some CLTs own the buildings too and rent them out. Some lease land to a housing cooperative that owns the building. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, the Caño Martín Peña CLT gives residents a surface rights deed instead of a ground lease. The shared idea is that the community holds the land and people hold secure rights to the buildings.

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Why separate the ownership of land from the ownership of buildings?

Because land is where most rising value comes from. When a neighborhood improves, or a new transit line or park arrives, the land beneath the houses goes up in value, and that drives out the people who were there first. By taking land out of the market and holding it for the community, a CLT keeps that increase in value tied to the place instead of to whoever sells next.

Splitting ownership also lowers the price of entry. A buyer pays only for the house, not the land, and any public subsidy stays with the home instead of being lost when it is sold. The idea has deep roots, from Henry George and the English garden cities to the Gramdan villages of India. The Roots of the CLT Movement tells that story.

The idea that rising land values are created by the community, not the individual owner, goes back to John Stuart Mill and Henry George in the 19th century. Separating land from buildings puts that idea into practice: the owner of a house keeps the value of what they built and paid for, while the value created by the community stays with the community.

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Is a community land trust the same as a land trust?

No. “Land trust” usually means a conservation land trust, which protects open space, farmland or wildlife habitat, often by buying land or holding conservation easements. In some U.S. states, notably Illinois, a “land trust” is also a legal arrangement for holding title to property privately.

A community land trust is different from both. It is a nonprofit that holds land for a community’s benefit, mostly so that housing and other buildings on it stay affordable and under local control. Some organizations combine conservation and community land trust work, and many CLTs also protect gardens and farmland. But when people talk about CLTs, they mean the community model described on this page.

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How is a CLT different from a land bank, a housing cooperative or a homeowners association?

A land bank is usually a public agency that takes in vacant, abandoned or tax-foreclosed property and passes it on to new owners. It is meant to hold land for a short time. A CLT holds land permanently. The two often work together, with a land bank transferring lots to a CLT.

A housing cooperative is owned by its residents, who share ownership of a building. A CLT can lease its land to a cooperative, and many do. A homeowners association manages shared property in a private development and has no mission of affordability. A CLT is a nonprofit with a public purpose: to keep land and housing affordable for people who are left out of the market, and to give the community a voice in how its land is used.

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What does a community land trust look like in practice?

There is no single picture. As John Emmeus Davis puts it, “Community land trusts are not all alike.” Almost as soon as the “classic” model was defined, practitioners began adapting every feature of it to fit local conditions, needs and laws, so that what is called a CLT “can vary greatly from one country to another, even from one community to another within the same country.” What most CLTs keep, he writes, are four core commitments: land stewardship, permanent affordability, lasting responsibility for what happens on their land, and accountability to the residents of the places they serve.

A few examples, most of them from Preserving Affordable Homeownership (Lincoln Institute, 2024), show the range.

Who starts them.

  • Neighborhood residents: “Take a stand, own the land” was the rallying cry of Boston’s Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, which created Dudley Neighbors Inc. in 1989.
  • City hall: Burlington, Vermont, put up $200,000 in 1984 to start what became the Champlain Housing Trust. In Florida, the Delray Beach Community Land Trust was formed in 2006 with the city’s redevelopment agency, which staffed it at first and has since given it more than 60 parcels of land.
  • A highway project: when a road extension threatened 140 families in Davis Bottom, a historic neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky, city and state transportation officials worked with residents to form the Lexington Community Land Trust in 2008, bought 25 acres for it, and raised the neighborhood by an average of ten feet to protect it from flooding.
  • A land bank: the Central Ohio CLT was set up in 2017 inside the Franklin County Land Bank in Columbus, sharing its staff and funding.

How big and how fast they grow. Some CLTs add a handful of homes a year. Others grow quickly with public support: the Houston CLT’s Homebuyer Choice program, funded by the city, helps buyers purchase existing houses whose land then goes into the CLT, and brought 167 homes into its portfolio between 2021 and the end of 2023. The Champlain Housing Trust, the largest CLT in the world, also owns about 2,500 apartments.

What they hold.

  • Condominiums: Elevation CLT in Denver built 92 condominiums in one neighborhood and 49 in another, on land banked for it by the Urban Land Conservancy.
  • Cooperatives: Cooper Square in New York City holds only cooperative housing; the Lopez Community Land Trust on Lopez Island, Washington, has built seven neighborhoods of cooperatively owned houses, along with land for farms and shops.
  • Buildings bought by their tenants: in Washington, D.C., the Douglass CLT helps tenants use the city’s right-to-purchase law to buy their buildings and bring them into the CLT.
  • Rentals on their way to ownership: in Philadelphia, the Women’s Community Revitalization Project builds tax-credit rental housing on land held by its Community Justice Land Trust, which tenants will be able to buy when the tax credit period ends.
  • Land for culture and ceremony: in Oakland and Berkeley, California, the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a women-led Indigenous land trust, has received land and a permanent easement for cultural practices and public education. See Indigenous-led Community Land Trusts.

Where they work. The Caño Martín Peña CLT in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was created by residents of eight informal neighborhoods to keep them from being displaced by the clean-up of a polluted canal; it holds 272 acres for about 1,500 households. In Europe, Community Land Trust Brussels was founded in 2012 with the support of its regional government, while London CLT grew out of community organizing around the 2012 Olympics. In Montreal, Communauté Milton-Parc governs a whole neighborhood of cooperative housing. More profiles are in our Case Studies, and the CLTs around the world topic covers other countries.

Sources

  • John Emmeus Davis, “In Land We Trust: Key Features and Common Variations of Community Land Trusts in the USA,” in John Emmeus Davis, Line Algoed and María E. Hernández-Torrales, eds., On Common Ground (Terra Nostra Press, 2020).
  • John Emmeus Davis and Kristin King-Ries, Preserving Affordable Homeownership: Municipal Partnerships with Community Land Trusts (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2024): Dudley Neighbors (box 1.2), Delray Beach (box 2.2), Lexington (box 3.1), Elevation CLT (box 3.2), Central Ohio CLT, Houston CLT, Douglass CLT, Women’s Community Revitalization Project, Lopez CLT, Cooper Square, Sogorea Te’, Caño Martín Peña. See Joint Publications.
  • John Emmeus Davis, Line Algoed and María E. Hernández-Torrales, eds., The Growth of Community Land Trusts in England and Europe (Terra Nostra Press, 2021).
  • CLT Center, Case Studies and Community land trusts in Puerto Rico.

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Do community land trusts work in rural areas?

Yes. The first CLT, New Communities, Inc., was a rural farming community in Georgia, and the early CLTs of the 1970s were mostly rural. Today rural CLTs provide affordable homes in small towns and resort areas where housing costs have climbed beyond local wages, protect farmland, and hold land for community buildings.

In England, many CLTs serve villages where young families and workers can no longer afford to stay. On Lopez Island in Washington State, the Lopez Community Land Trust has built homes for island residents since 1989.

Rural CLTs face their own pressures. In resort areas, islands and villages near cities, second homes and retirees can push prices far beyond what local workers earn. On Lopez Island, Washington, islanders formed the Lopez Community Land Trust in 1989 to provide homeownership for people earning less than 60 percent of median income, something they were told “couldn’t be done.” It has since built seven neighborhoods of cooperatively owned houses, along with land for farms and shops. In England, the first CLT, the Stonesfield Community Trust, was formed in a village in Oxfordshire in the 1980s, and most of England’s 300-plus CLTs are rural.

Rural CLTs also protect farmland and hold land for community buildings. The challenges are different from those in cities: fewer staff and funders, small numbers of homes, and, for farmland, legal limits on long leases and farmers’ need to own land to borrow against it.

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