Social Housing Models: Land Trusts, Limited Equity Cooperatives & Public Housing
Social housing isn't a far-off idea. Communities across the country already live in it. This post covers three proven models: community land trusts, limited equity cooperatives and public housing. Each one takes homes off the speculative market and keeps them permanently affordable, in its own way.
Read how each model works below, or download the papers to share.
Community Land Trusts
What is a Community Land Trust?
A Community Land Trust (CLT) is an independent, non-profit, community-controlled entity that owns and cares for land and housing on behalf of its low- and moderate-income community members. Housing built on this land is sometimes owned by the CLT and sometimes owned by the residents themselves.
Central to their mission, CLTs work to create and sustain long-term affordable housing opportunities by ensuring that land that they steward for their members remains permanently affordable. This ensures current and future generations can access affordable homes and wealth-building opportunities they might not otherwise have, and that community land and housing are not lost to financial speculation.
How Does a Community Land Trust Create Long-Term, Community-Controlled, Affordable Housing?
At the core of their approach, CLTs acquire and hold land long-term, typically under 99-year leases held “in trust” for community members, who decide how to use it and help ensure long-term affordability. Some CLTs also acquire, rehab, and sell homes, serving a role similar to that of a non-profit developer. While the CLTs own the land, often residents own their homes at affordable prices.
These homes can be single-family homes, apartment rentals where the CLT owns the building, condominiums, or co-operatives. In exchange for an affordable home and a say in how the community develops, resident owners agree to make less profit if they sell their house to ensure that housing remains affordable for the next owners.
What is the History of CLTs?
The first modern Community Land Trust was New Communities, Inc created in rural Lee County, Georgia, in 1969. New Communities grew out of the civil rights movement as a new tool for Black farmers to shape their own communities in a hostile political and economic environment. The 5,735-acre property was purchased with a $50,000 grant from the National Sharecroppers Fund and a $1 million loan. Since New Communities, CLTs have purchased more than 14,200 homes, ensuring long-term affordability and community control over land use.
How are CLTs Formed and Governed?
Usually, CLT governing boards include residents, community members, and others with relevant expertise, such as non-profit experts and developers. Community members ensure the CLT meets their needs by providing services and community spaces or supporting small businesses. Non-profit experts and developers can help access funding and support residents.
Organizing is essential to creating CLTs. Tenant leaders and community organizations have worked to create CLTs across the country by informing residents, securing funding, and achieving community control. The initial investment in purchasing buildings and land is usually supported with government and philanthropic support and favorable lending.
How are CLTs Different From Other Housing?
Ensure permanent affordability
Separate land ownership from homeownership, preventing land speculation:
CLTs lower the cost of housing vs. market based housing
In current market-based housing, increasing value of land means owners are driven to cash out on skyrocketing prices.
Home prices and rents are higher when investors believe they can charge more or build luxury unaffordable housing.
The Houston CLT lowered home costs in Black communities, such as the Third and Fifth Wards, by $150,000. This allowed community members to pay $75,115 to own their home. At the same time, home prices in the same neighborhoods were increasing by 28% and 17%.
CLTs serve as a strong tool for anti-displacement, ensuring that homeowners can stay in their homes
Default rates for CLT homeowners are ten times lower than default rates for market-rate homeowners
CLTs provide support, financial counseling, and resources to keep housing affordable for low-income homeowners
Serve as a tool for racial justice
Foster self-determination
Rather than wealthy individuals and developers determining what businesses can afford rent in a neighborhood or how much a home costs, community members get to decide how the land in their neighborhood is used.
How CLTs are Working Across the Country
Community Land Trusts are already working across the country. There are 346 shared-equity homeownership models, or CLTs, at various stages of development.
Africatown CLT in Seattle worked to establish mixed-use spaces that support Black-owned businesses and affordable rental housing in a historically Black neighborhood.
Recently, Africatown acquired the Liberty Bank Building, which has more than 100 affordable rental units and retail space reserved for Black-owned businesses
Tenants in California worked with San Francisco CLT and Oakland CLT to buy their buildings
Filipino and Latino residents living in 285 Turk, a 40-unit building in the Tenderloin District, organized to prevent a 70% rent increase. Organizers educated residents about creating a co-operative and were able to purchase their building for $10.4 million with favorable loan terms, private financial support, and expertise from the San Francisco CLT. Now tenants can control their housing.
Limited Equity Cooperatives
How Apartment Co-ops Work as Social Housing
In a housing co-op, the cooperative corporation holds the title to the entire building or property. Residents do not own their individual apartments; instead, they own shares in the corporation and hold a "proprietary lease" that gives them the right to occupy a unit.
The co-op is democratically controlled by its members, who elect a board of directors to oversee major decisions, budgets, and building management. This gives residents a direct voice in how their housing is run, a key distinction from traditional rental housing.
How Does the "Limited-Equity" Model Keep Co-ops Affordable for the Long Term?
The most common social housing co-op model is the Limited-Equity Cooperative (LEC). In an LEC, the co-op's bylaws contain a formula that restricts the resale price of a member's share. When a member decides to move out, they cannot sell their share to the highest bidder on the open market. Instead, the share is sold at a limited, pre-determined price—often back to the co-op or to another income-eligible household.
This removes the incentive for speculation and ensures that the unit remains permanently affordable for the next low- or moderate-income resident, rather than becoming a windfall for the departing member.
How Do Residents Pay for Their Housing in a Co-op?
There are two main costs. First, there is a membership fee to join the co-op. In LECs, this is kept intentionally low, sometimes as little as a few hundred or thousand dollars, to be accessible to low income households. Second, residents make regular monthly payments that cover their share of the building’s collective expenses, including the blanket mortgage, insurance, utilities, and reserves for repairs. Because the co-op holds a single mortgage rather than each resident having an individual loan, members do not need to qualify for a traditional mortgage to live there.
Public Housing
What Is Public Housing?
Public housing is the nation’s oldest federal rental assistance program, authorized by the U.S. Housing Act of 1937. It provides decent, safe, and affordable rental units to over a million low-income households. The program is administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which provides federal funding, while day-to-day ownership and management are handled by more than 3,000 local Public Housing Authorities (PHAs).
Who Owns and Manages Public Housing?
Public housing is owned by the government and operated by local Public Housing Authorities (PHAs), which are state-chartered local agencies. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides federal funding and oversight, but the day-to-day management, maintenance, and tenant selection are handled by the local PHA. There are over 3,000 PHAs across the country managing roughly 920,000 public housing units.
How is Public Housing Social Housing?
Many of the basic principles of social housing are met with public housing: it is permanently affordable and decommodified, publicly owned, and has generally strong tenant protections and a level of tenant governance that could be improved, but is significantly stronger than what exists in the private housing market.
What is the Current State of Public Housing?
The public housing stock is aging and shrinking despite the need escalating. Funding cuts, driven by racism and austerity policies, have left public housing with a $70 Billion backlog of needed maintenance and repairs which has led to an approximate loss of 100,000 public housing units annually either through demolition or conversion. Many units are lost each year to demolition or conversion to other programs.
For example, the massive backlog of capital repairs in some public housing developments, has led some Public Housing Authorities to convert properties out of public housing through programs like the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) in order to access private funding for renovations. Finally, federal law currently prohibits PHAs from increasing the total number of public housing units beyond what they had in 1999 (known as the Faircloth limit).
As a result of all of these issues, the number of units has declined from about 1.3 million in the 1990s to just under 920,000 today.
Why Is It Important to Preserve & Build More Public Housing?
Repairing existing and building more public housing is essential because the existing stock is shrinking while the need for deeply affordable housing continues to grow. The private housing market consistently fails to produce housing affordable to the lowest-income households and other existing low-income housing programs are insufficient to meet the need. The critical feature of public housing rents set at 30% of someone’s income makes public housing more affordable to the average low income tenant, unlike other affordable housing programs. Expanding the public housing stock would address several critical national problems.
Public housing fills a gap the private, for profit, market will not and that other affordable housing programs cannot. The United States faces a severe shortage of affordable homes for the lowest-income renters, estimated at over 7 million units. Public housing is one of the few tools that provides permanently affordable units targeted specifically to these families, who otherwise face severe cost burdens or homelessness.
Why Does Public Housing Have a Bad Reputation?
Public housing’s negative reputation is not primarily the result of the program’s inherent design, but rather a consequence of deliberate political choices: decades of chronic defunding and a sustained push toward privatization. These forces created the visible deterioration and concentrated poverty that critics then point to as proof that public housing “doesn’t work.”
Defunding created the conditions critics blame on the program itself. For decades, Congress has failed to adequately fund public housing operations and capital repairs, leaving housing authorities unable to maintain aging buildings. In 1985, the Reagan administration slashed federal maintenance funding from roughly $35 billion to $7 billion annually, effectively starving the program of the resources needed to keep units habitable.
Privatization has been used to reduce the stock rather than preserve it. Federal policy has actively discouraged the growth and even the maintenance of public housing. Congress stopped funding new public housing construction in the 1990s and capped the number of units housing authorities could operate at 1999 levels. Since then, more than 250,000 public housing units have been lost—demolished, sold, or converted to vouchers—rather than repaired or replaced. Programs like HOPE VI and the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) have transferred public housing into private or mixed-finance ownership, often reducing the number of deeply affordable units in the process.
As public housing scholar Lawrence Vale has noted, the image of public housing deteriorated alongside its physical condition, and political leaders used that deterioration to justify moving away from the program rather than fixing it.
Read our position paper: Public Housing: A Central Pillar of Social Housing
Alliance for Housing Justice is a coalition of organizations including Popular Democracy, Center for Law and Social Policy, Housing Justice for All NY, Housing Now! CA, Liberation in a Generation, PolicyLink, People's Action, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, National Housing Law Project, PowerSwitch Action, Poverty & Race Research Action Council, Public Advocates & Right to the City Alliance
