CLTs and Habitat for Humanity

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CLTs and Habitat for Humanity

How Habitat for Humanity affiliates and community land trusts, two movements with shared roots in southwest Georgia, work together to keep homes affordable for one family after another.

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How are Habitat for Humanity and community land trusts connected?

They share a birthplace. In 1968, Clarence Jordan, the founder of Koinonia Farm in southwest Georgia, and his friend Millard Fuller launched Koinonia Partners to build low-cost homes that low-income families would own. The land stayed with a nonprofit, the Fund for Humanity, which would not sell it. One of Jordan’s “partnership principles” was that “all land will be held in trust by the Fund for Humanity but will be used by the partners free of charge.” Koinonia Partners became the forerunner of Habitat for Humanity.

Thirty miles away, Slater King and other civil rights leaders were creating New Communities, the first community land trust, on about 5,700 acres near Albany, Georgia. King was one of the advisors Jordan consulted when he reshaped Koinonia along similar lines: land held in trust, homes owned by the families who lived in them. Both men died in 1969. Under new leaders, Koinonia Partners became the seed of Habitat for Humanity, and New Communities became the seed of the CLT movement.

For about 30 years the two movements went separate ways. As Habitat spread from the countryside to the cities, few affiliates kept the practice of leasing land. Around 2000, local Habitat affiliates and local CLTs began working together again, and the two movements have been drawing closer ever since.

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Why do Habitat affiliates work with CLTs?

Because both want a community’s investment in a home to last. When a Habitat home is resold at market price, two things are lost: the subsidy the affiliate put into the home, and one more affordable home in the community. Affordable for Good, the report John Emmeus Davis wrote for Habitat for Humanity International’s 2017 Shelter Report, describes two ways affiliates have responded.

“Dollars that last” recaptures the subsidy when a home resells, usually through second and third mortgages, and puts the money into a new Habitat home. “Homes that last” keeps the subsidy, and most of the increase in value, in the home itself, so that it sells at an affordable price to one low-income family after another. Davis writes that both strategies have merit. But where land is expensive and prices are rising, recaptured dollars buy less and less, and many affiliates have concluded that keeping the subsidy in the home works better. Running a CLT program, or partnering with a CLT, is one of the main ways to do that.

The two kinds of organization also fit together. Habitat affiliates are experienced builders, and they know how to prepare families for homeownership. CLTs hold land for the long term and provide stewardship after the sale: overseeing resales, helping homeowners keep their homes in good repair, and stepping in when an owner falls behind. A partnership lets each do what it already does well. Affiliates also find that donors like to see their gifts help family after family, not just the first one.

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How do Habitat–CLT partnerships work?

There are two main forms. Some Habitat affiliates run a CLT program of their own: the affiliate keeps ownership of the land and leases it to each homeowner under a long-term ground lease, as a CLT does. Others partner with a local CLT, building Habitat homes on land that the CLT owns. The CLT then holds the ground lease and looks after the home when it is resold. Among the CLTs that contributed to Preserving Affordable Homeownership, the Lincoln Institute’s 2024 report, a dozen operate inside another organization, either a community development corporation or a Habitat affiliate.

Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity in Minnesota shows what partnering can look like. Over about five years it has placed some 60 homes in land trusts with metro-area partners: two nonprofit CLTs, City of Lakes Community Land Trust in Minneapolis and Homes Within Reach in suburban Hennepin County; two county development agencies that run CLT programs; and Rondo Community Land Trust in Saint Paul, where a project is in planning. Depending on the partner, the work has included shared fundraising, joint development and joint marketing of homes. One program with Homes Within Reach brought Habitat into Edina, a suburb where it had never built before, with city funding that the affiliate could not have tapped on its own.

Statewide networks help as well. The Minnesota CLT Coalition, formed in 2005, connects 14 CLTs that together had 1,631 homes in trust at the end of 2024. Its members share documents and lessons freely, which makes it easier for a Habitat affiliate to find a partner and learn how the work is done.

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How many Habitat affiliates use CLTs?

A growing number. Habitat for Humanity International counts a home as having “lasting affordability” if it stays affordable for at least 30 years, with resale restrictions that remain in force well beyond the first buyer. Shared appreciation alone, where the affiliate only takes a share of the gain on resale, does not count.

In a recent survey, 590 of Habitat’s roughly 970 affiliates responded, and 199 said they use a lasting affordability model, up 47 percent from 135 in a survey two years earlier. Together they account for about 2,000 homes. About three of every four of those homes use deed restrictions. Ground leases and CLTs are a smaller share but are growing: 34 affiliates use a CLT, some running their own and some partnering with an outside CLT. Habitat for Humanity International now has a Lasting Affordability Program to help affiliates adopt these models.

The trend is recent, but the practice is not. Bruce Rogers, a staff member at Habitat for Humanity International, tracked partnerships between affiliates and CLTs for years and had documented about three dozen by around 2010. Habitat’s 2017 Shelter Report endorsed permanently affordable housing, and since 2021 Habitat for Humanity International has actively encouraged it.

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What results have these partnerships produced?

Habitat for Humanity Seattle-King County is one example. When it merged in 2012 with an affiliate on the east side of the county that had run its own land trust program, the combined portfolio had 429 houses, 116 of them resale-restricted homes on leased land. By 2017, 23 of the land trust homes had been resold. The sellers had lived in their homes for an average of 6.4 years, had bought with no down payment, and left with an average of $28,418. The homes had first sold at prices affordable to households earning 46 percent of the area median income. On resale, they were affordable at 42 percent. They had become more affordable, not less.

Habitat for Humanity New York City has decided that all of the housing it develops will be permanently affordable, using deed restrictions, limited equity cooperatives and a CLT program that was still being developed in 2017. The reason was experience. Homes the affiliate built in Harlem and Brooklyn 15 to 20 years earlier, with short-term restrictions, were being sold for six-figure gains. “Had we implemented permanent restrictions 20 years ago,” said Christopher Illum, the affiliate’s vice president for homeownership, “these homes would be affordable for working-class families today.”

These results match the wider research on CLTs and shared equity homeownership. See Are CLTs effective?

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What does a CLT partnership mean for a Habitat homebuyer?

In most ways, buying a Habitat home in a CLT is like buying any Habitat home. The family prepares for homeownership, helps build, and buys with an affordable mortgage. The difference is that the land is leased from the CLT or the affiliate, and the resale price is set by a formula so the home stays affordable for the next buyer.

Habitat and CLT staff are candid that this differs from conventional homeownership. Ben Post of Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity says buyers are often skeptical at first. His affiliate introduces the idea early and returns to it with more detail as buyers go through the process, so that no one learns the terms too late. Homeowners still build wealth: they pay down their mortgage, keep a share of any increase in value, and pay far less than market rent. Twin Cities Habitat, for example, now gives the homeowner a fixed 25 percent of the increase in value, with the rest kept in the home for the next buyer. Brenda Lano-Wolke of Homes Within Reach adds that wealth is not only money at resale. It can also mean living near work or in a good school district.

Homeowners also have someone to turn to after they buy. Habitat for Humanity New York City, for example, now helps its homeowners and cooperatives with major repairs and with city rules on taxes and construction. This kind of stewardship is part of what makes the homes last.

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How do local governments support Habitat–CLT partnerships?

Increasingly, with land and money. Cities and counties want the homes they subsidize to stay affordable, and they want an organization standing behind those homes to make sure they do. John Emmeus Davis calls this the “sweet spot” for Habitat affiliates and CLTs: stewardship is work they do well, and when they approach a local government together, they make a stronger case for its support.

Preserving Affordable Homeownership, the 2024 report by Davis and Kristin King-Ries for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, gives several examples. The City and County of Sheridan, Wyoming, each allocated $1.5 million to help Habitat for Humanity of the Eastern Bighorns start a CLT; its Weston Village site is planned for 30 CLT homes. In Seattle, the Homestead CLT and Habitat for Humanity Seattle–King and Kittitas Counties received city-owned land from the Office of Housing, along with properties donated by Sound Transit, the regional transit authority. In Bellingham, Washington, the Kulshan Community Land Trust, Habitat for Humanity and the city were among the partners in Telegraph Townhomes, opened in 2022. In Vermont, the Champlain Housing Trust and Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity have built homes together in Shelburne, an affluent town just south of Burlington.

Davis expects local governments to become even more important partners as federal support declines. Not every city or county will be eager to help, he cautions, but they are more likely to work with Habitat affiliates and CLTs that are already working with each other.

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What makes these partnerships hard, and what helps?

Partnering takes time and effort. Speakers at a December 2025 webinar on Habitat–CLT partnerships named several challenges. Each organization has its own way of working, marketing itself and crediting partners. Jeff Washburne, the longtime director of City of Lakes Community Land Trust, advises bringing board members and staff into the conversation from the start, not just the leaders. Funders may worry about paying twice for the same project when money comes from several sources. Homebuyers may face two sets of paperwork, one for Habitat and one for the CLT, and partners are working to combine them.

Mortgages can also be an obstacle where lenders see a 99-year ground lease as new or risky. In Minnesota, the state housing finance agency made its loans available for CLT homes in the early 2000s, which helped bring other lenders along. Today Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both offer mortgage products for CLT homes. Ben Post of Twin Cities Habitat sums up what helps most: “nail the why.” Be clear about what the partnership makes possible that neither organization could do alone.

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To learn more, watch the webinars Habitat for Humanity–CLT Partnerships for Lasting Affordability (July 2025), which presented Preserving Affordable Homeownership, and Scaling Housing Supply through Habitat for Humanity–CLT Partnerships (December 2025).

More questions about community land trusts? See all frequently asked questions, or ask the CLT LibrarianAI, our AI assistant.