Community land trust
A non-profit holds land permanently and leases it to residents who own their buildings, separating the two so homes stay affordable after the first sale.
Every term on this page describes a document that exists. Ask to be shown it rather than told about it — the lease, the share certificate, the deed, the ground lease. Being shown it is the answer; being told about it is not. Then ask who has lent on this before, because a structure nobody has ever financed is a structure that has not been tested.
A community land trust separates ownership of the land from ownership of the buildings on it. A non-profit holds the land permanently and leases it — typically on a long ground lease — to residents who own or co-own their homes.
The separation is the entire mechanism. Most of the price rise in housing is the land, not the structure. Take the land permanently off the market and the home stays affordable to the next household, and the one after that, without the subsidy having to be paid again.
What it means in practice
Residents own their building and can usually sell it, but the sale price is set by a resale formula written into the ground lease — commonly returning the owner’s investment plus a limited share of any appreciation. The rest stays with the home.
Decisions about the trust are typically shared between residents, the wider community, and public-interest representatives, so that the land is not controlled solely by whoever currently lives on it.
An example
The model is usually traced to New Communities Inc., founded in 1969 near Albany, Georgia by civil rights organisers, who adapted ideas from communal land tenure elsewhere to secure land for Black farmers who could not otherwise hold it safely.
The best-documented modern case is the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont, established in 1984 and now among the largest CLTs anywhere. It received a World Habitat Award in 2008, and its resale data is published — which makes it one of the few places you can check the affordability claim over decades rather than take it on trust.
Sources & further reading
- 1 Champlain Housing Trust — the longest published record of CLT resales
Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked. How this is written
Related terms
Members collectively own the entity that owns the building, and hold a right to occupy rather than a deed to a flat.
A group who chose each other, live together or close by, and have written down how they decide things.
A community consciously designing its social, ecological, economic and cultural systems to regenerate the place it sits in.