| Goals and Benefits
A Community Land Trust (CLT) functions to preserve public investment and to recycle and protect affordability. This arrangement between Community stakeholders and social service organizations protects housing affordability in perpetuity by ensuring that the housing is made affordable to low- to moderate income persons upon sale. The stakeholders/organizations are usually seeking to resolve problems in their respective communities that can be addressed through the following goals and their benefits:
- Stewardship: CLT’s preserve scarce resources
- a. Preserving affordability one generation after another.
- b. Preserving public subsidies, lands, and inclusionary units.
- c. Preserving the condition and design of publicly-funded amenities.
- Mobility: CLT’s can rebuild the housing tenure ladder.
- a. Multiplying the choices the low-income people have when they seek to improve the type and tenure of their housing.
- b. Allowing low-income people to step into homeownership-in small steps.
- Security: CLT’s provide housing that provides additional support to low-income households.
- a. Supporting first-time homeowners after they purchase a home.
- b. Intervening to cure defaults and prevent foreclosures.
- Stability: CLT’s give communities greater control over their future.
- a. Reinvesting in dilapidated areas without fueling gentrification.
- b. Enacting “smart growth” measures without imposing additional burdens on inner city neighborhoods and vulnerable populations.
- Flexibility: CLT’s are adaptable to sites, funding resources and constituencies.
- a. Abandoning a “one size fits all” approach to community development
- b. Mixing uses of land and types of housing in scattered-site projects
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