Understanding Subsidy Retention

This 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.