Making a home that’s affordable, for good

From the article:

Qualifying homebuyers — families who make less than 80 percent of the area’s median income — can choose to pay roughly $180,000 for a house and the land. Or they can put the land into the Houston CLT and pay for just the structure, about $80,000, and agree to a resale restriction that limits how much the home can appreciate in value.

[..]

Since 2011, every big city in [Texas] has either established or is working to establish a community land trust. Austin has two. A Dallas nonprofit and the City of San Antonio are both actively working to start CLTs. Smaller cities are following suit; even advocates in Abilene — population 122,999 — are looking at the model as housing costs creep up.

[...]

Over the past couple of years, Rogers, of GNDC, says, he’s started to get calls from city planners in unexpected places — smaller Texas cities like Lubbock and La Grange — that have seen housing costs rise rapidly while incomes remain stagnant. The time to invest in a land trust, he says, is before gentrification hits, when land can still be acquired affordably. He still kicks himself for turning down two riverfront lots in Austin selling for $16,000 apiece two decades ago.