Community Land Trust Resource Center: Featured Archives

Video: Asset Building and Affordable Homeownership

Homeownership has historically offered the best asset building strategy available to middle class american families. But homeownership has changed and is no longer available to many moderate income households. Local government programs that seek to make ownership affordable however frequently choose to limit the price that homeowners can sell for in order to preserve affordability for future buyers. But affordability protections are sometimes opposed by those who want to encourage homeowner wealth building. These debates are really about the very purpose of affordable homeownership programs. This 15 minute video presentation looks more closely at local affordable homeownership programs from the point of view of asset building. Can affordable ownership programs be seen as asset building strategies? How do they compare with traditional ownership?[More]

Posted by Rick Jacobus | Comments (0)

The City-CLT Partnership

1395_CLT PFR Cover LoRes.jpg Based on a review of three dozen municipal programs and in-depth interviews with local officials and CLT practitioners, this report describes the mechanisms and methods that cities across the country are using to structure their investment in CLT startups, projects, and operations. In addition to describing the full range of options for providing municipal support, the report highlights specific model practices for rendering that assistance.[More]

Posted by Rick Jacobus | Comments (0)

Video: A New Way Home: Sharing Equity to Build Wealth

This video produced by NCB Capital Impact and NeighborWorks America highlights local shared equity homeownership programs across the country that are providing wealth building homeownership opportunities while preserving affordability for future generations. [More]

Posted by Rick Jacobus | Comments (0)

Starting a CLT: Organizational and Operational Choices

The community land trust is a model of great versatility, leading to wide variation in the ways in which the CLT is structured and applied. Starting a Community Land Trust: Organizational and Operational Choices is an introductory manual prepared by John Emmeus Davis. It describes those decisions that matter the most in the early days of planning a CLT – choices that every sponsor of a new CLT must make. It presents the range of options for making each decision and reviews the pros and cons that should be weighed in selecting one course of action over another. These are choices of purpose, program, and scope that precede more technical deliberations over bylaws, ground lease, resale formula, and the like – topics covered elsewhere in publications like the CLT Legal Manual and the many materials posted by Burlington Associates on its CLT Resource Center. [More]

Posted by Burlington Associates | Comments (0)

Shared Equity Homeownership

Over a year ago, the National Housing Institute (NHI) launched an on-going investigation of three models of housing tenure that use durable contractual controls to perpetuate the occupancy, eligibility, and affordability of homes that are owned and occupied by low- and moderate-income households: the community land trust, the limited-equity cooperative, and deed restricted housing with covenants lasting 30 years or more. The findings are contained in a new report authored by Burlington Associates founder John Emmeus Davis entitled Shared Equity Homeownership: the Changing Landscape of Resale-Restricted, Owner-Occupied Housing. [More]

Posted by Rick Jacobus | Comments (0)

Interactive Resale Formula Comparison Tool

Click here to launch the application This general purpose educational tool was designed to help community leaders understand the relative performance of different limited equity resale formulas. So much of what sets one model apart from the other is dependant...[More]

Posted by Rick Jacobus | Comments (0)

Designing Resale Formulas

Resale formulas, embedded in a CLT ground lease, a deed covenant, or other legal instrument, are tailored to accomplish the specific goals that a nonprofit corporation has set out for itself and for its homeowners. Here is a QuickTime presentation,...[More]

Posted by Mike Brown | Comments (0)

Master List of CLTs in the United States

Compiled and classified by Burlington Associates and by Kirby White of Equity Trust, with the generous assistance of Julie Orvis and Jeff Yegian of ICE, this Master list of Community Land Trusts in the United States, is current as of...[More]

Posted by Mike Brown | Comments (0)

CLT Overview Presentation

An animated presentation, designed by Mike Brown, introducing Community Land Trusts. It briefly explains how CLTs work and why they are increasingly being utilized in communities across the country. This presentation requires the free QuickTime Player which can be downloaded...[More]

Posted by Mike Brown | Comments (0)

Burlington Community Land Trust Resale Study

Permanently Affordable Homeownership: Does the Community Land Trust Deliver on Its Promises? A performance evaluation of the CLT model, using resale data from the Burlington Community Land Trust. A report copyrighted by the BCLT © 2003, displayed on this website...[More]

Posted by Mike Brown | Comments (0)

Understanding Subsidy Retention: A Flash Animation

This flash animation, designed by Rick Jacobus, dramatically demonstrates the merits of "subsidy retention" as a preferred policy for investing public dollars in affordable housing. The argument illustrated in this presentation is that Community Land Trusts, like other models of shared equity homeownership, are effective in locking public subsidies into each home that is sold, ensuring a stock of permanently affordable housing. This is an improvement over the housing investment policies of most cities and states that either allow homeowners to pocket public subsidies when reselling their assisted homes or require the recapture of public subsides so they may be re-loaned to other low-income households in the future. [More]

Posted by Mike Brown | Comments (0)