Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are an effective funding mechanism for building affordable homes to meet local demand.  Our blog explains what Resonance has learned working with London CLT.

The rising cost of housing in many parts of the country often excludes first time buyers.  In London the current house prices are between seven and thirty times median earnings; the cost of renting has doubled in the past ten years and more people are having to spend between half and three quarters of their income on rent.

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are being set up all over the country to help bring the cost of local housing down to affordable levels and keep it there, by carefully keeping control of future sales where the difference in price is passed onto the new owners as affordability.  CLTs are sometime known as Community Property Trusts (CPTs) and they can be cooperatives too.

Resonance has had a fantastic opportunity to work with London CLT throughout 2015 and 2016, to develop the project and over the next two years to help bring the stability provided by a CLT to more than one hundred and eighty homes and seven hundred people.

Just like other CLTs, they’re making their local area more affordable again and returning affordable housing to the market helping to make it be more about home, family and community; rather than money, profit and price. By connecting the cost of the homes to the average earnings rather than house prices it helps fix the price of the properties at an affordable level and keep them there throughout the ups and downs of the house market so that they can remain affordable for generations to come.

The CLTs hope to lower the cost of its residents housing, at London CLT their aim is that residents have to spend no more than a third of their income on their home and the homes on their first development if twenty-three houses are currently valued close to one third of the neighbouring open-market priced homes.

The best thing about CLT’s though, is that the houses aren’t the focus, they’re just the tool which helps to stabilize families and build communities. Run by members, for its members a CLT enables people to work as agents of change in their community, a fine example can be seen by looking over the Atlantic to London CLT’s US counterpart, the Champlain Housing Trust with nearly three  thousand homes, six thousand people and more than three hundred million dollars in assets.

With the right investment and working together as communities there’s no reason we can’t change the housing market for ours and future generations – the model is established and it’s working. This is just the beginning but then, revolutions always start small.