The values of housing:

Community land trusts (CLTs) seek to decommodify land and remove housing from the speculative market, keeping it permanently affordable and under community control. As housing markets grow steadily more unaffordable, housing advocates, planners, and community organizers are turning to CLTs as a potential means to provide affordable housing. However, with the growth of CLTs has come a growing skepticism about whether CLT homeownership makes low-income homeowners better off than if they were to buy homes on the market. This is primarily driven by the fact that narratives around homeownership in the United States center on housing as a financial investment (Martin et al. 2020, Saegert et al. 2009). Since CLTs limit the amount a home’s value can appreciate, questions have arisen about whether owning a home on a CLT has the same wealth-building benefits that owning a home on the market has.

In this project, we explore current research on how the myopic view of housing as a financial investment obscures the non-monetary value communities and people gain from homeownership, what the value of CLT homeownership is when conventionally non-economic factors are accounted for, and whether CLT homeownership can in fact be a vehicle for building financial wealth, despite restrictions on the resale value of CLT homes. We conclude that CLT homes allot their owners and communities invaluable non-financial benefits in the form of stability, community and family cohesion, collective social assets, and cultural survival while providing an opportunity for low-income people to build individual financial wealth.   

Narratives of homeownership in the US depict it as an attainable centerpiece of the American Dream (Ehlenz & Taylor 2019), denoting responsibility, status, security, stability, and the opportunity for wealth accumulation (Martin et al. 2020). It has long been one of the largest factors in building intergenerational wealth (Loh et al. 2023). As a result, dominant narratives in the US often depict homeownership as the surest path to financial security and future stability. Americans perceive it as a guarantee against a lost job, rising rents, or a medical emergency as well as a way to secure their retirement, finance their children's education, or help their children one day buy a home of their own (Demsas 2022).  

This dominant narrative masks the heterogeneity of American experiences around housing and homeownership, particularly across racial groups. From the 1930s through the 1960s, explicit racial policies, such as redlining, limited access to homeownership resources in areas with high concentrations of Black people (Loh et al. 2023). Meanwhile, public programs, such as the GI Bill, subsidized homeownership in the suburbs, which disproportionately benefited white people due to discriminatory policies. Thus, the rates of homeownership and associated wealth building benefits have overwhelmingly favored white people – a pattern still prominent in the US today.  

Boston is no exception. In 2021, 70% of Boston’s white households owned their home, while only 37% of African American and 31% of Hispanic households were homeowners. White homeowners also receive most (78% in 2017) of the benefits of the federal mortgage interest tax deduction. Moreover, Black and Latino people are more likely to be renters, and more than 50% of Black and Latino renters were cost burdened in 2009 and 2019. Black residents are nearly five times more likely to miss a mortgage or rent payment than white residents and almost twice as likely as Latino residents (Loh et al. 2023). 

Not only does access to homeownership vary across racial groups, but homeownership is also not the guarantee of stability it is often made out to be. The 2008 foreclosure crisis exposed the risks involved with conventional homeownership. These risks disproportionately impact Black and brown communities due to discriminatory and predatory lending practices. Illustrating such risks, the Center for Responsible Lending found that between 2007 and 2012, 12.5 million owners lost their homes to foreclosure. In the same period, residents living close to properties that foreclosed lost roughly $2.2 trillion in property value, with an estimated 95 million households impacted. Over 50% of this spillover loss is associated with communities of color; minority neighborhoods lost an estimated $1.1 trillion in home equity, reflecting the high concentrations of foreclosures in neighborhoods of color (2013). 

Additionally, the foreclosure crisis spotlighted another narrative of homeownership in the US that emphasizes housing as an economic investment. At the height of the 2008 crisis, Smith observed a blurring of the distinction between housing – as a financial product – and home – providing security, belonging, and respectability (2008). As a result, prevalent narratives of homeownership increasingly focused on extracting financial value from housing (Martin et al. 2020; Smith 2008). McCabe found that this emphasis on home value fosters exclusionary homeowner politics aimed at protecting that value, such as residential segregation, undermining the purported benefits of homeownership to society of ‘invested’ and engaged citizens by fostering unequal outcomes (2016).  

The dominant narrative of homeownership amplifies only one part of the American homeownership experience. In actuality, conventional homeownership is not always attainable, does not always confer stability, and does not guarantee wealth accumulation and financial security. The realities of economic cycles and the foreclosure crisis of the Great Recession complicated that dominant storyline. The narrative that housing needs to build financial equity in order to confer the benefits of homeownership—stability, belonging, etc.—is not only incomplete but also obscures the potential of alternative strategies like CLTs to provide such benefits. In the following sections, we aim to foster alternative discourses on the meaning of homeownership when the narrow focus on housing as a financial commodity is removed.

Community land trusts challenge current conceptions of housing as an investment and reassert its primary function as a secure place to live. Access to affordable housing and the opportunity to build some equity are important elements of what CLTs offer, but a myopic focus on their economic benefits obscures the far-reaching radical effects they can have. CLTs create space and structure for community control and stability, building personal and collective agency and moving towards reparation of racial and economic harms. CLTs model alternative understandings of wealth and foster relationality, thus resisting the one world world of capitalist hegemony. Deepening the connections between community land trusts and other elements of solidarity economy ecosystems, in part through sharing of financial resources, can amplify their power to both fight and build. As Osterweil eloquently argues, “by asserting and creating multiple other ways of being in the world, these movements rob capital [or the state] of its monopoly and singular definitions of time, space and value” (in Gibson Graham 2006). 

Acolin, A., Ramiller, A., Walter, R. J., Thompson, S., & Wang, R. (2021). Transitioning to Homeownership: Asset Building for Low- and Moderate-Income Households. Housing Policy Debate, 31(6), 1032–1049.  https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2021.1949372  

 Agyeman, Julian and Kofi Boone. (2022). “The Black Commons: A Framework for Recognition, Reconciliation, Reparations,” in Sacred Civics, ed. by Jayne Engle, Julian Agyeman, and Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook (New York/London: Routledge, 2022). 

Carter, Lisa. (2021, July 15). “DNI Community Land Trust Oral History Project.” Interview by Ros Everdell. University of Massachusetts Boston, Joseph P. Healey Library.  https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collection/p15774coll11/id/244/rec/10    

Center for Responsible Lending. (2013). 2013 Update: The Spillover Effects of Foreclosures.  https://www.responsiblelending.org/research-publication/2013-update-spillover-effects-foreclosures  

Cho, Sharon. (2024, April 5). Conversation with the authors. 

 Demsas, J. (2022, December 20). The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake. The Atlantic.  https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/homeownership-real-estate-investment-renting/672511/  

Ehlenz, M. M., & Taylor, C. (2019). Shared Equity Homeownership in the United States: A Literature Review. Journal of Planning Literature, 34(1), 3–18.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0885412218795142  

 HRB Admin. (2022, April 14). Does community land trust homeownership keep people poor? Housing Resources Bainbridge.  https://www.housingresourcesbi.org/does-community-land-trust-homeownership-keep-people-poor/   

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). A Post-Capitalist Politics. Introduction: A Politics of Economic Possibility. University of Minnesota Press.  

 Loh, P. (2015, September 17). Land Trusts Offer Houses That People With Lower Incomes Can Afford—And a Stepping Stone to Lasting Wealth. YES! Magazine.  https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2015/09/17/land-trusts-offer-houses-low-income-people-can-afford-and-a-stepping-stone-to-lasting-wealth  

 Loh, P., Gao, C., & Shively, J. (2023). Community Land Trusts (Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2023). Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning (UEP) at Tufts University.  https://www.tbf.org/-/media/tbf/reports-and-covers/2023/gbhrc2023-full-report.pdf  

Lowe, Lydia in an interview with Michelle de Lima, February 2024. 

Martin, D. G., Hadizadeh Esfahani, A., Williams, O. R., Kruger, R., Pierce, J., & DeFilippis, J. (2020). Meanings of limited equity homeownership in community land trusts. Housing Studies, 35(3), 395–414.  https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2019.1603363  

McCabe, B. J. (2016). No Place Like Home: Wealth, Community and the Politics of Homeownership. Oxford University Press. 

Saegert, S., Fields, D., & Libman, K. (2009). Deflating the Dream: Radical Risk and the Neoliberalization of Homeownership. Journal of Urban Affairs, 31(3), 297–317.  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9906.2009.00461.x  

Schneider, J. K., Lennon, M. C., & Saegert, S. (2023). Interrupting Inequality Through Community Land Trusts. Housing Policy Debate, 33(4), 1002–1026.  https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2022.2055614  

Smith, S. J. (2008). Owner-Occupation: At Home with a Hybrid of Money and Materials. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 40(3), 520–535.  https://doi.org/10.1068/a38423  

Temkin, K., Theodos, B., & Price, D. (2010). Balancing Affordability and Opportunity: An Evaluation of Affordable Homeownership Programs with Long-term Affordability Controls | Urban Institute. The Urban Institute.  https://www.urban.org/research/publication/balancing-affordability-and-opportunity-evaluation-affordable-homeownership-programs-long-term-affordability-controls  

Thaden, E. (2011). Stable Home Ownership in a Turbulent Economy. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.  https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/stable-home-ownership-turbulent-economy  

Wilson, Debra. (2021, February 9). “DNI Community Land Trust Oral History Project.” Interview by Ros Everdell. University of Massachusetts Boston, Joseph P. Healey Library.  https://openarchives.umb.edu/digital/collection/p15774coll11/id/226/rec/4