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Building Better City-CLT Partnerships

A Program Manual for Municipalities and Community Land Trusts

John Emmeus Davis, Rick Jacobus, and Maureen Hickey

June 2008, English


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.