Interrupting Inequality Through Community Land Trusts

Abstract

Relying on market-based housing policies has been inadequate to meet the need for affordable and sustainable housing and has heightened disparities in the housing system, especially along lines of race and gender. Community land trusts (CLTs) promise more equitable ways of providing stable, secure, and affordable housing for those marginalized in market-based housing. Yet there has been limited research comparing CLT housing with mainstream tenures. Using data from the first sample survey of CLT owners (N = 216) that includes comparison groups of market owners (N = 142) and renters (N = 130) drawn from similar low- and moderate-income populations, we find that those who purchase CLT homes are similar demographically to renters but compared with market owners are more likely to be Black and from households headed by women. We find no difference between CLT and market-rate homeowners in terms of benefits often attributed to homeownership, specifically financial well-being, stability, and a sense of house as home. CLT owners report having more time and resources to pursue desired activities than do market owners. Despite their demographic similarity to CLT owners, renters fare worse on all of these dimensions. We conclude with policy recommendations for housing tenures that provide permanent affordability, greater social equality and greater democratic resident control.

Keywords:

• community land trust (CLT)
• affordable housing
• race
• gender
• housing tenure
• social housing

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Co-PIs at Georgia State University, Deirdre Oakley and Erin Ruel, and our program officer at the National Science Foundation, Scott M. Freundschuh. This work was made possible by the support of the staff and members at City of Lakes CLT and First Home Network in Minneapolis, and Proud Ground and Portland Housing Center in Portland. Finally, the research would not have been possible without the dedicated and insightful work of Claire Cahen, Hayoung Jeong, and Erin Lilli, and the whole Housing Environmental Research Group over the last 10 years.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Prepurchase homeownership education and counseling (HEC) is targeted to first-time homebuyers, often those in groups with histories of low rates of homeownership. It is increasingly required by lenders, affordable homeownership programs, and some mortgage programs from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Li, Bai, Goodman, & Zhu, 2016).

2 Not all CLTs use an owner-resident model. In fact, the majority of CLT units are rentals (Ciardullo, 2013). In our study, however, both CLTs use the owner-resident model.

3 Note that not all CLTs follow this structure, including one of the CLTs in our study, but they often still provide residents with the ability to vote for board members.

4 This is a quotation from a Portland renter in our study.

5 The studies cited vary in how they define larger landlords. Raymond et al. (2018) use 15 or more properties as their threshold, and Seymour and Akers (2021) use 16 or more.

6 CLTs are not disembedded from networks of real estate and finance. Rather, they work through and with them to provide more equitable approaches that are less extractive than those commonly associated with market-based housing. They mitigate and buffer households from speculative real estate and financial practices, but do not eradicate them.

7 Shared equity homeownership also includes limited-equity co-ops, deed-restricted affordable homeownership programs, and resident-owned communities, but CLTs are the most common form (Carlsson, 2019; Davis, 2006).

8 Administrative data from the organizations were extensive and included demographic, financial, and housing-related information. While there were differences among the organizations with respect to the exact data points collected, they all collected key study variables such as household income, housing costs, race, age, and gender. HEC records are collected at the time of “intake” for homebuyer education and counseling. For CLTs, this information is collected when applying for a CLT home (or wait list in the case of Proud Ground). The data provided to the research team were deidentified by the organizations and governed by data use agreements that stipulated their storage and use. Administrative data were linked to survey responses using unique identifiers generated by each organization.

9 Based on data from Grounded Solutions Network’s Homekeeper National Data Hub, about 15% of shared equity homeownership programs hold more than 200 units as of March 2021.

10 Across all groups, 57 participants did not complete the survey. Twenty-three of them stopped after the second question. We immediately dropped them from the study as nonresponses. In addition, we had nine cases that were duplicates because of participants being members of multiple groups, or different members of the same household responding to the survey from different organizations. This attests to the interrelatedness of the HECs and the CLTs. Our decision on which case to keep was based on the most recent organization information. For example, if a person participated in homebuyer education with an HEC 5 years ago, and entered a CLT 3 years ago, we kept the information from the CLT as the most recent activity. For cases in which we could not determine the most recent activity, we flipped a coin to choose which case to retain.

11 The populations from which our sample was drawn were City of Lakes CLT (226 households), Proud Ground CLT (277 households), Proud Ground wait list (452 households), 1st Home Network (1425 households), and Portland Housing Center (1807 households). Each population was compared to its achieved sample using t-tests for continuous variables (such as income and household percentage of AMI) and Chi-square statistics for nominal variables (such as gender and race).

12 CLT growth has often tracked the imperatives of federal affordable housing funding (Thaden, 2018a). Palmer (2019, p. 9) notes that common sources of CLT funding include federal funding administered by local governments, such as the HOME Investment Partnership Program, Self-Help Homeownership Opportunity Program (SHOP), and Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds.

13 Limited-equity cooperatives are a form of collectively owned and democratically governed form of housing. Households own a share of the cooperative, which is generally more affordable than an owning a home in a CLT but provides similar degrees of stability, security, and autonomy (Ehlenz, 2018; Lawton, 2015; Saegert & Benítez, 2005). CLTs and LECs have been used in tandem in some U.S. cities (Ehlenz, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [Grant 1559577].

Notes on contributors

Jakob Kendall Schneider

Jakob Kendall Schneider is a PhD candidate in environmental psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a research assistant at the Housing Environments Research Group. His current research explores how community land trusts are situated in relations of property, race, and housing financialization.

Mary Clare Lennon

Mary Clare Lennon is a professor of sociology and social welfare at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on issues related to housing, mobility, and neighborhoods. She is currently working with colleagues in the UK on a comparative study of childhood residential mobility and is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, University College London.

Susan Saegert

Susan Saegert is a professor emeritus of environmental psychology, social psychology, and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she directs the Housing Environments Research Group. Her recent research concerns homeowners’ experiences of the foreclosure crisis and their policy implications, housing and health, and democratically controlled collective ownership.