Building Better City-CLT Partnerships

The number of community land trusts (CLTs) in the United States has grown rapidly in recent years, due largely to the expanding investment and involvement of local govern-ment. Municipalities are supporting CLT start-ups, CLT projects, CLT operations, and the equitable taxation of resale-restricted CLT homes. This city-CLT partnership is still evolving, however, with municipal officials and CLT practitioners still exploring the most effective ways of working together. The present manual is necessarily a work in progress, documenting the “best” practices devised to date. These are practices that use public resources to expand a CLT’s holdings, while respecting what makes a CLT unique and while addressing a municipality’s reasonable concerns about a CLT’s performance and sustainability.