Bringing permanent affordable housing and community control to scale: The potential of community land trust and land bank collaboration

Abstract

Community land trusts (CLTs) are a unique model of shared equity homeownership that promote equitable development and empower homebuyers in historically exclusive real estate markets. As a timely study about the potential future governance around affordable housing, the multiple case studies here identify places that have both a CLT and land bank, and where nascent initiatives by local governments focused on creating permanent affordable housing are facilitating collaborations between local CLTs and land banks. By exploring the themes and dynamics of these emerging collaborations with qualitative methods, the authors evaluate how CLTs can leverage collaborations with land banks as a tool to scale up permanent affordable housing and community control. Understanding how CLTs may benefit from collaborations with land banks is timely considering the current affordable housing crisis and an increasingly widespread recognition of systemic inequitable access to property ownership.