The Virginia Statewide Community Land Trust (VSCLT) is a new tool for mission-focused housing developers around the state. VSCLT was founded by a group of Habitat for Humanity affiliates throughout Virginia that wanted to pool their resources and expertise to better serve families in the long term. They saw an opportunity to offer affordable housing options in perpetuity through the CLT model.

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) secure subsidy indefinitely by restricting the future sales price of the home, ensuring that it will always be affordable. The VSCLT model allows local partners to enhance the work they already do in creating inclusive wealth building opportunities through homeowner-ship, amplifying their impact.

Although Habitat Affiliates helped create VSCLT, any local mission-focused builder or developer can place homes in the trust and create permanent affordability for their communities. Contact us at info@vsclt.org to learn more about partnership opportunities.

Why Should Habitat Affiliates Consider the CLT Model?

• Placing your Habitat homes into the VSCLT will extend the affordability of the homes in perpetuity.
• Using a CLT is easy and streamlined, thanks to the creation of VSCLT.
• This new program makes your subsidy dollars to go further, helping generations of families with your work.
• With the VSCLT’s help, you can create a permanently affordable stock of homes in your community.
• CLTs naturally compliment the mission of Habitat for Humanity by creating inclusive opportunities for households to build wealth through homeownership.
• CLT homes address the concerns communities and funders have around gentrification and the loss of affordability in our communities.

CLTs, like the model for Habitat for Humanity, has origins in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.The history of the two models has always been interconnected, and both have been used for decades to provide wealth-building opportunities for households excluded from the traditional housing market. Increasingly, in recent decades, Habitats around the country have been turning to CLT models in order to preserve scarce subsidy dollars.

How Does It Work?

• From your perspective, little will change about the transaction, except at the closing table the land underneath the home will be transferred separately to the VSCLT.
• The VSCLT will work with you to educate homeowners about the program and prepare them to sign the ground lease.
• The VSCLT will work with you to operate the program during subsequent home sales.

Community Land Trusts Are Neighborhood Assets

• By creating and stewarding permanently affordable homes, CLTs operate for the benefit of lower income families AND for their neighborhoods.
• CLT homes become increasingly affordable compared to market over time. The result is that CLT homes remain affordable in perpetuity, even as the neighborhood changes around them.

Protection and Mobility for Homeowners

• In expensive neighborhoods, shared-equity homeownership can provide and redistribute opportunities to low-income residents that have been excluded.
• In low-income neighborhoods, shared-equity homeownership can protect personal and community wealth from economic downturns, and can provide social capital by allowing a community to organize and govern land.