The 2022 Census of Community Land Trusts and Shared Equity Entities in the United States

As communities around the United States grapple with a growing affordability crisis and the ongoing legacy of racially exclusionary housing policies, community land trusts (CLTs) have attracted growing attention from housing practitioners and policy makers as a potential solution. By effectively removing housing from the speculative market and keeping it permanently affordable, CLTs can bring equitable and targeted relief to the housing crisis. In particular, CLTs are best known for providing shared equity homeownership opportunities, where a one-time investment substantially reduces the price of a home to make it affordable to lower income homebuyers and then the resale price is restricted to keep it affordable for subsequent lower income homebuyers.

Many nonprofits have adopted shared equity homeownership models and may refer to themselves as “CLTs,” “shared equity programs,” or “below market-rate programs.” The scope of this study includes self-identified CLTs (except for those found to be exclusively conservation land trusts) and nonprofits with shared equity homeownership programs (except for nonprofits exclusively providing cooperative housing). Hereinafter, we will refer to the population of entities identified to meet this definition as “CLT/SE entities.”

In the face of the ongoing, sustained housing crisis, CLT/SE entities have continued to develop. Despite growing interest in the model, the last comprehensive, national survey of the CLT field was conducted over a decade ago. To capture the diversity and evolution in CLT/SE entities, this study updates and expands on this previous effort and represents the most exhaustive study of CLT/SE entities to date. Employing extensive primary and secondary data collection strategies that encompassed consolidation of multiple directories, online surveying, web-based data queries, and field expert outreach, we systematically and rigorously tracked the prevalence, practices, and outcomes of CLT/SE entities in the United States and Puerto Rico.

This working paper details aggregate results from the collected data. It not only comprehensively updates the last survey conducted over a decade ago but also covers many emergent and previously under-documented practices in the field.