I spent my formative years without a plan. Always so interested in the future, but my own future just did not occur to me. The reverberations of that of that are still impacting me today. I didn’t do college, get a degree, find a career and thus I now find myself in no position to buy a home.
While I operated my life without emphasis placed on my future, I did always wistfully picture having my own house. The sense of stability that must come from owning a home must be an exceptional feeling, and my own home would serve as a proud marker of my success in life. But primarily, for me, a house is the ultimate project. You can just keep fucking with it until you die. It is the eternal project. The project from which a million projects are born. That’s my idea of a good time.
It wasn’t until very recently that it’s begun to dawn on me that my dumb-dummy choices of yesteryear not only prices me out home ownership, but that lack of essential middleclass wealth is going to lock me out of the most probable path for upward mobility. Oops.
That is to say; without a owning a home I will likely always be a little poor.
I could probably stand to be a little less hard on myself. I am not alone. Far from it.
It used to be a lot more attainable to own a home and that was just a couple of short generations ago. Even since 2000, wages have increased by 18% but home prices have increased by an approximate 145%. The reasons for the meteoric climb in prices are varied, but a contributing factor and consequence is that home ownership has become an investment tool of the monied class and corporations alike, with 1 and 7 new start homes being corporate owned.
Like our democracy, home ownership simply isn’t for the average citizen anymore. It’s another thing that they’ve been edged out of.
I’m listening to “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which seems to argue that the most direct path to solving our housing affordability crisis is by simply building a lot more housing with a lot less regulation. I do love simple solutions that appear to cut through the proverbial gordian knot, but I’d argue that entire production process has grown too rotten to just “do it more.”
I’ve been investigating alternative home models to traditional home ownership since I created the People’s Accord, which has prescriptive measures listed in the article about the right to quality and affordable shelter. I’ve come across some interesting ideas, but a lot of them remove the wealth building advantages of owning a home and while I’m an enthusiastic progressive, I’m not trying to remap the pathways of the middleclass economy. That, and I don’t want roommates, even if we’re working for a common goal and all those noble purposes.
What I’ve found are Community Land Trusts, which right away conjures images of life by committee, but its actually about separating the land ownership from the home ownership to make housing more affordable up front, and as a feature, affordability is maintained rather than quickly escalating.
That’s the basic idea of a Community Land Trust (CLT): take the land out of the equation, put it in the hands of a nonprofit trust, and let people buy the homes that sit on it. You still own your home, you still get a mortgage, and you can still paint your front door whatever color you want. But you lease the land underneath it from the trust, which keeps things stable and a hell of a lot more affordable.
The whole point is to treat housing less like a hot stock and more like what it actually is: a place to live. The trust keeps the resale prices in check, usually with some kind of formula that limits how much profit you can make when you sell. That way, the next buyer can afford it too—and the cycle continues. It’s a kind of anti-gentrification magic trick.
And yeah, at first blush, that sounds like a tradeoff. Less upside if the market goes wild. But also? Less downside. Less chance that you’re priced out, bought out, or boxed out of ever owning at all. For folks like me, who’ve missed all the traditional on-ramps to middle class wealth, this starts to sound less like compromise and more like salvation.
Now—if you’re a wonk like me or just someone trying to squint down the road to the future—you might ask: okay, but what about equity? What about actually building wealth, even if it’s not obscene Zillow-fueled windfalls?
Enter: Community Land Trusts with Enhanced Equity.
These models still put community stability front and center, but they loosen the cap a bit. They let homeowners keep a larger share of the home’s appreciation when it’s sold. So, you’re not flipping it for profit like some HGTV fever dream, but you are rewarded for improvements, for tenure, for the basic principle that you lived and invested in a place.
Some of these enhanced models even use shared appreciation formulas—like, say, you and the trust split the increase in market value 60/40 or 70/30. Or they let you pocket the added value of that new bathroom you paid for out of pocket. It’s equity with a conscience. You’re not getting rich, but you’re not stuck either.
It’s still not perfect. If you’re a “house as investment vehicle” person, this isn’t your model (and you’re a dick). But if you’re someone like me—who wants roots, who wants a place that’s mine to tinker with until I croak, and who doesn’t want to be punished forever for not getting a head start—this looks like a real path forward.
And more than that, it’s a collective strategy. A different way of imagining ownership in a system that’s increasingly stacked against the un-rich. CLTs are a patch on a broken system, sure. But they’re also a crack of light.
They’re not the whole solution. But they’re something real, something now, and something that works.
Three very fun words for my future house: Secret Bookcase Doorways.