Community Land Trusts Are the Only Proven Antidote to Gentrification — And Black Neighborhoods Need 1,000 of Them

Gentrification has a particular cruelty to it that distinguishes it from other forms of displacement, and the cruelty is this: it punishes you for staying. You stayed in the neighborhood when no one with money wanted to live there. You stayed through the disinvestment, through the crack epidemic, through the years when the city treated your block as a place to warehouse poverty rather than a community to invest in. You stayed, and you built something — a church, a barbershop, a sense of belonging that cannot be measured in property values — and then, precisely because you built something worth having, the speculators arrived. They arrived with cash offers and renovation budgets and the particular vocabulary of urban renewal that has been used to justify the displacement of Black residents from their own neighborhoods for the better part of a century. And the market, which is presented as a neutral force but which operates in a context of radically unequal purchasing power, did what the market always does: it went to the highest bidder. And you, who had been paying property taxes and keeping the block alive when no one else would, discovered that staying — the thing that should have been rewarded — was the thing that priced you out.

The data on Black displacement from gentrifying neighborhoods is unambiguous. Research published by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that in neighborhoods experiencing significant gentrification, Black population declined by an average of 40% over a ten-year period. These are not people who chose to leave. These are people whose rents doubled, whose property taxes tripled, whose small businesses lost their customer base as the demographics of the neighborhood shifted around them. They were displaced by a process that the real estate industry calls “neighborhood improvement” and that the people being displaced call something considerably less polite.

But there is a model that stops this. Not slows it. Not mitigates it. Stops it. It has been operating for over fifty years, it has been tested in cities across America, it survived the 2008 financial crisis with virtually zero foreclosures, and it is so effective at preserving community stability that the only reasonable question is why every Black neighborhood in America does not have one. It is called a community land trust, and it works because it addresses the one variable that every other anti-gentrification strategy ignores: the land itself.

The Model: When the Community Owns the Ground

A community land trust is a nonprofit organization that acquires land and holds it permanently in trust for the benefit of the community. The key word is permanently. The CLT does not buy land to flip it. It does not buy land to develop it for maximum profit. It buys land and removes it from the speculative market forever. Homes are built or rehabilitated on CLT land and sold to income-qualified buyers at affordable prices. The homeowner owns the house. The CLT owns the land beneath it, leased to the homeowner through a 99-year renewable ground lease. When the homeowner sells, the resale price is limited by a formula written into the lease — typically allowing the homeowner to capture 25% of the appreciation, with the remaining 75% retained by the CLT to keep the home affordable for the next buyer.

This structure accomplishes something that no other housing model can: it creates homeownership that is permanently affordable. The homeowner builds equity — modest equity, but real equity, the kind that provides stability and a foundation for wealth-building. And when they sell, the next family can buy at a price that is affordable to households at the same income level, because the CLT’s ground lease prevents the market from bidding the price up to whatever the neighborhood’s newest, wealthiest arrivals are willing to pay. The land trust is, in essence, a firewall between the community and the speculative market. It says: this land belongs to the people who live here, and no amount of outside capital can take it.

“We had tried everything else. We tried rent control, and it leaked. We tried affordable housing mandates, and developers found loopholes. We tried subsidized construction, and it expired. The land trust is the only thing that works permanently, because it removes the land from the speculative market permanently.”
— John Emmeus Davis, founder of the National Community Land Trust Network

Born from the Civil Rights Movement

The first community land trust in the United States was not an urban experiment by progressive planners. It was founded by civil rights workers in rural Georgia. New Communities Inc. was established in 1969 by Charles Sherrod and Shirley Sherrod, veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, on 5,700 acres in Lee County, Georgia. The Sherrods understood something that the civil rights movement’s legislative victories had not addressed: without land, freedom is theoretical. You can have the right to vote and the right to eat at any lunch counter and the right to send your children to any school, but if you do not own the ground beneath your feet, you are one rent increase, one property tax assessment, one speculator’s offer away from being somewhere else.

New Communities was ultimately foreclosed upon in the 1980s after the USDA denied it emergency loans that were routinely granted to white farmers — a discrimination that was later confirmed in the Pigford settlement. But the model survived. It survived because it was right, and because the communities that adopted it proved, over decades, that it worked.

Dudley Street: The Community That Took Back 1,300 Lots

In the early 1980s, the Dudley Street neighborhood in Boston’s Roxbury section was a wasteland. Literally. Arsonists had burned much of the housing stock for insurance money. Drug dealers operated openly on streets lined with vacant lots that the city used as illegal dumping grounds. The neighborhood was approximately 38% Black, 29% Latino, 25% Cape Verdean, and 8% white, and it had been abandoned by every institution that was supposed to serve it. The city had no plans for the neighborhood. Developers had no interest. The residents had every reason to leave and very few reasons to stay.

What happened next is one of the most remarkable community organizing stories in American history. The residents formed the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, demanded and received from the city of Boston the power of eminent domain over abandoned land in the neighborhood — the first time a community organization had been granted this authority — and established a community land trust to hold and develop approximately 1,300 vacant lots. They did not gentrify their own neighborhood. They built it: affordable homes, community gardens, a town common, playgrounds, commercial space for locally owned businesses. And because the land trust structure ensured permanent affordability, none of the development they created could be captured by speculators. When Boston’s real estate market exploded in the 2000s, pushing housing prices in surrounding neighborhoods beyond the reach of working families, the Dudley Street CLT held. Its residents stayed. Their rents did not double. Their property taxes did not triple. The community they had built remained theirs.

Zero Foreclosures: The 2008 Test

The 2008 financial crisis was, among many other things, a natural experiment in the comparative stability of different housing models. The results were definitive. The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont — the largest community land trust in the country, with over 2,200 homes in its portfolio and forty years of operating history — recorded zero foreclosures during the crisis. Zero. While the conventional housing market collapsed, while millions of American families lost their homes to predatory mortgages they never should have been sold, while entire neighborhoods were hollowed out by foreclosure and abandonment, CLT homeowners kept their homes. The reason is structural: CLT mortgages are underwritten conservatively, CLT homeowners receive ongoing support from the trust, and the resale restrictions that limit speculation also limit the over-leveraging that caused the conventional market to collapse.

Atlanta, and Everywhere Else

The Atlanta Land Trust, founded in 2009, operates in one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the American South. Atlanta’s BeltLine project — a 22-mile loop of trails, parks, and transit connecting 45 neighborhoods — has been celebrated as an urban planning triumph and criticized as a gentrification accelerator, and both descriptions are accurate. Home prices in BeltLine-adjacent neighborhoods have increased by 40% to 67% since the project’s inception, and the neighborhoods most affected are historically Black communities that are experiencing exactly the displacement pattern that gentrification always produces. The Atlanta Land Trust was created specifically to ensure that long-term residents of these neighborhoods can remain, by acquiring land, building affordable homes, and holding them in trust permanently.

Similar CLTs have been established or are being established in cities across the country: the Oakland Community Land Trust, the D.C. Community Land Trust, the Houston Community Land Trust, the Queensbridge Community Land Trust in New York. The National Community Land Trust Network now counts over 280 member organizations. But this number is still dramatically insufficient. There are approximately 1,200 majority-Black census tracts in America that are currently experiencing or are at imminent risk of gentrification-driven displacement. Each of these communities needs a land trust. Most of them do not have one. And every year that passes without one is a year in which land is sold, residents are displaced, and the community assets that generations built are transferred to people who had no part in building them.

How CLTs Are Funded — And How to Start One

Community land trusts are funded through a combination of sources: municipal housing trust funds, CDBG (Community Development Block Grant) allocations, state housing finance agency programs, CDFI Fund grants, foundation grants, and, increasingly, social impact investment. Some CLTs generate ongoing revenue through ground lease fees. Others operate on annual budgets supported by local government and philanthropic funding. The startup costs are real but manageable — the National CLT Network provides technical assistance to communities seeking to establish new trusts, and several successful CLTs were started with initial budgets under $200,000.

The process begins with community organizing: a group of residents who share a commitment to permanent affordability in their neighborhood forms a nonprofit corporation, develops bylaws and a ground lease template, and begins acquiring land. The governance structure is critical and distinctive: CLT boards are typically composed of one-third CLT residents, one-third community members who are not CLT residents, and one-third public representatives. This tri-partite structure ensures that the trust is governed by the community it serves, not by outside interests, and it is the governance model that distinguishes CLTs from every other form of affordable housing, which is ultimately controlled by developers, government agencies, or investors whose interests may diverge from those of residents.

The Policy Supports That Matter

Community land trusts can be established without government permission, but they scale dramatically with government support. The most impactful policies are straightforward: first, municipal land disposition policies that give CLTs priority access to publicly owned land, including tax-foreclosed properties, surplus government land, and properties acquired through eminent domain. Second, dedicated funding streams through housing trust funds, inclusionary zoning in-lieu fees, and real estate transfer taxes. Third, property tax policies that assess CLT homes based on their restricted resale value rather than their market value, ensuring that the affordability of CLT homeownership is not undermined by property tax increases driven by surrounding market appreciation.

These policies exist in some jurisdictions and not others, and their presence or absence is often the difference between a CLT that can scale to serve its entire neighborhood and one that remains a small demonstration project. The advocacy work needed to enact these policies is real and ongoing, and it requires exactly the kind of organized community power that CLTs themselves help to build. This is the virtuous cycle at the heart of the model: CLTs create organized communities, organized communities advocate for policies that support CLTs, and the CLTs grow, creating more organized communities. It is institution-building in the purest sense, and it is the kind of institution-building that Black communities have always excelled at when given the tools and the information.

The Land Is the Answer

Every conversation about gentrification in Black neighborhoods eventually arrives at the same impasse: the market is powerful, capital is mobile, and communities that lack the financial resources to compete with well-funded investors and developers will, in the long run, be displaced. This is presented as inevitable, as the natural working of economic forces that no policy can permanently overcome. And for every anti-gentrification strategy that operates within the market — rent control, affordability mandates, subsidized construction with expiring covenants — this assessment is largely correct. These strategies slow displacement. They do not stop it. They buy time. They do not buy permanence.

The community land trust is different because it does not operate within the speculative market. It removes land from the speculative market. It says: this parcel of earth belongs to this community, in perpetuity, regardless of what the surrounding market does, regardless of how many investment firms decide that this neighborhood is the next hot market, regardless of how many luxury developments are built on the next block. The land belongs to the people who live on it. Full stop. And because the land is the foundation on which everything else is built — the houses, the businesses, the schools, the sense of place and belonging that makes a neighborhood a community rather than a real estate market — controlling the land is controlling the future.

Black Americans have understood this since Reconstruction, when the promise of forty acres represented not merely an economic asset but the material foundation of freedom itself. The promise was broken. The land was taken back. And in the century and a half since, every mechanism of displacement — from sharecropping to redlining to urban renewal to gentrification — has operated on the same principle: if you do not own the land, someone who does will eventually decide they have a better use for it than letting you live there. The community land trust is the answer to that principle. It is the mechanism by which a community can own the land permanently, govern it democratically, and ensure that the people who built the neighborhood are the people who benefit from it. The model exists. The data supports it. The only thing missing is the scale. And the scale is a choice — a choice that every Black neighborhood facing gentrification can make, if it has the information and the organizational will to make it. The land is the answer. It has always been the answer. And the community land trust is how you keep it.