Can We Make Homebuying Permanently Affordable?

At Next City, we've covered a lot of community land trusts: CLTs developing disaster-resilient housing, CLTs helping recruit Black public school teachers through housing opportunities, CLTs helping house Indigenous foster youth aging out of the system. They're a potent and increasingly popular tool for creating permanently affordable housing amid – but CLTs also have some drawbacks.Yet some of those pain points can be mitigated when paired with another powerful vehicle for affordable housing development: land banks. When the Next City team visited Richmond, Virginia for our annual Vanguard gathering last year, one of the most striking solutions for urban change that we encountered was the country's first combined community land trust and land bank.The Maggie Walker Land Trust – named after a local icon who was the first woman of color to establish a bank in America, among other historic titles –  expects to make its 100th home sale soon, less than a decade after its founding.“One of MWCLT’s goals is expanding equitable access to homeownership, and we have made great strides to increase Black homeownership in our programs,” the organization's executive director, Lark Washington, told Next City earlier this year.To learn more about community land trusts, land banks, and the impact of combining these tools, listen to this episode and subscribe to Next City.