What is a Community Land Trust?
A community land trust is a private non-profit corporation created to acquire and hold land for the benefit of a community and provide secure affordable access to land and housing for community residents. CLTs prohibit speculation of land and housing, promote ecologically sound land-use practices, and preserve the long-term affordability of improvements on the land.

A Community Land Trust is a democratically structured, community based non-profit corporation, designed to strike a fair balance between individual and community interests.

The purpose of the CLT is to acquire land and remove it from the speculative, for-profit market. The land is made available to individual families, cooperatives, and/or other organizations through long-term leases.

CLT’s combine the best features of private and community ownership. Residents have some essential benefits of home ownership: lifetime security, a limited fair equity for their investment, and a legacy for their descendants.

What is the history of Community Land Trusts?
Founders of the Institute Community Economics (ICE) conceived the Community Land Trust (CLT) model in the late 1960’s. One source of inspiration was Vinoba Bhave’s Granada or “land gift” movement in India, a successful voluntary land reform effort initiated during the 1950’s. Also influential were the Jewish National Fund, the conservation land trust movement, and Native American concepts of land stewardship. The Community Land Trust (CLT) is a contemporary American adaptation of these influences: a new model for land reform, preservation and sustainable, affordable development.

How are CLTs different from conservation land trusts?
Both CLTs and conservation land trust control land use for the benefit of people in the future as well as the present, but they tend to be concerned with different types and uses of land.

Conservation trusts are primarily concerned with controlling rights to undeveloped land to preserve open space, ecologically fragile or unique environments, wilderness, or productive forest or agricultural land. CLTs, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with acquiring residential use.Some land trusts combine both purposes, preserving some land in a natural state while leasing other land for development.