| Community Land Trusts |
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Economic Justice includes affordable housing for all. The Community Land Trust is one model to make this a reality.COMMUNITY LAND TRUST: Truly affordable housing for low income peopleThe Community Land Trust (CLT) is a nonprofit membership-based organization established to hold title to land in order to provide benefits to its local community. It usually exists to make land and housing available to residents who cannot otherwise afford them. The word "trust" emphasizes responsibility and stewardship for the whole community including its low income residents. The CLT may buy the land and build on it or may buy land and buildings together. The CLT then rents or more often sells the houses or units of a multi-family building at an affordable price to low income people while retaining ownership of the land the buildings are on. Thus the CLT holds the land permanently so that it will always benefit the community. When a CLT sells homes, it leases the underlying land to the homeowners through a life time (sometimes 99 years) lease, which gives the residents and their descendants the right to use the land for as long as they wish to live there. Individual houses or units of a large building are bought at an affordable price and owned by those who use them. Buyers must agree to live in the house as their principal residence, not be absentee landlords. When CLT homeowners decide to move out of their homes, they can sell them. However, the land lease requires that the home be sold either back to the CLT or to another lower income household, and for an affordable price. The home owner builds some equity in the home but it is limited so the price of the house in say ten or twenty years is still affordable to low income workers, not market rate. CLTs have been established to serve inner-city neighborhoods, small cities, clusters of towns, and rural areas. CLTs may develop housing themselves or may hold land beneath housing produced by other non-profit and sometimes for-profit developers. A CLT may build new homes, rehabilitate older homes, or acquire existing housing that needs little or no renovation. Some CLTs have bought mobile home parks to provide long-term security for mobile home owners. In addition to providing affordable housing, CLTs may make land available for small businesses, artist space, community gardens, playgrounds, or open space, and may provide land and facilities for a variety of community services. Who controls a CLT? A CLT is member-based and governed by a board elected from the community served. All CLT residents are members, and other people in the community may also join. The members elect the CLT's Board of Directors. Usually there are three kinds of directors on the Board - those representing resident members, those representing members who are not CLT residents, and those representing the broader public interest. In this way, control of the organization is balanced to protect both the residents and the community as a whole. Source: The above information was mainly taken from the website of the organization that developed the Community Land Trust model in the 1960's, the Institute for Community Economics at www.iceclt.org. Please look at their site for much more information. Local Examples of CLTs:
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