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Community Land Trusts

Organizations dedicated to providing affordable housing through democratically-controlled structures of land ownership involving both residents and members of the surrounding community.

December 1, 2025

Fueling the Future of Community Ownership

This webinar, moderated by Shelterforce's Miriam Axel-Lute, caps off our most recent Under the Lens series “Innovations in Community Ownership.” Learn about the power of Los Angeles’s Measure ULA, New York City’s take on a shared services model, cooperation between conservationists and affordable housing development in New York’s Hudson Valley, and more. Speakers: —Deyanira Del Rio, executive director of the New Economic Project and convener of NYC Community Land Initiative. —Roberto Garcia Ceballos, co-director of Fideicomiso Comuniatario Tierra Libre, and director of the LA Housing Training Hub. —Chris Brown, board vice president of Trillium Community Land Trust, and a member of Hudson Valley Alliance for Housing and Conservation.

November 21, 2024

Housing Cooperatives: Preserving Affordability and Community Ownership in Missoula, Montana

This documentary short highlights an inspiring cooperative housing model designed to prevent displacement and create home ownership opportunities for Missoula residents.

December 11, 2023

Moving Upstream

Healthcare-based interventions addressing social needs such as food and housing generally fail to impact the upstream wealth and power inequities underlying those needs. However, a small number of US healthcare organizations have begun addressing these upstream inequities by partnering with community wealth building initiatives. These initiatives include community land trusts, resident-owned communities, and worker cooperatives, which provide local residents ownership and control over their housing and workplaces. While these partnerships represent a novel, upstream approach to the social determinants of health, no research has yet evaluated them.

August 24, 2023

Limited Equity Co-ops and Community Land Trusts

This country needs more affordable homeownership options. And more communities are looking to the long-established Limited Equity Cooperative (LEC) and Community Land Trust (CLT) models to provide a permanently affordable way to provide homes for low and moderate-income individuals and families. But how do these models work to provide housing ownership and stability? Who controls the decision-making, and how do you get them financed and developed?

November 22, 2021

Community Owned Real Estate

Ebony Gustave interviews East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative Executive Director Noni Sessions for the Cooperative Journal podcast.

July 23, 2020

Black Commons, Community Land Trusts, and Reparations

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) offer a way to keep land out of the speculative market while providing a step towards reparations for African Americans.

November 25, 2019

Do housing co-ops decommodify housing?

The differences between market-rate housing cooperatives, limited-equity housing cooperatives, and zero-equity co-ops.