Newsletters

For me, April has been a month filled with big-picture thinking about our state’s housing affordability challenges and how Community Home Trust fits into the spectrum of models for tackling those challenges.

On April 8, I joined our newly-formed North Carolina Community Land Trust Coalition for its first in-person meeting, an all-day strategic planning retreat facilitated by Armstrong McGuire. The Coalition is a statewide alliance of organizations utilizing the community land trust model with a goal of increasing permanently affordable housing options across our state. Community land trusts are a powerful solution for housing affordability that is permanently protected. This model stabilizes and uplifts low- to moderate-income residents and disenfranchised populations. Grants from the SECU Foundation and Z Smith Reynolds served as the seed funding to launch this new Coalition. You can read more about this Coalition and our planning retreat on our blog.

The next day, Daniele Berman, our Director of External Relations and Advocacy, and I joined about 150 other housing professionals and advocates from across the state at the North Carolina General Assembly in Raleigh for NC Housing Day 2025. The lobby day was organized by the NC Housing Coalition, the NC Coalition to End Homelessness, and Habitat NC.

Throughout the day, groups held scheduled meetings with representatives to share with them why housing affordability must be a priority. We had opportunities to talk about the challenges facing each of our communities and how our individual organizations are working to meet those challenges. We also talked generally about housing in our state and the range of strategies and tools available to make sure all our neighbors have a safe, affordable place to call home. Midday, there was a press conference on the plaza, which you can see footage from in this ABC11 news story.

Days like these two, when I’m able to step away from the daily tasks of running an organization and spend time thinking about our work on a higher level, I’m reminded of what a powerful tool community land trusts are. There are many ways to provide affordable housing, from emergency shelter to subsidized rentals to first-time homeownership – and we can’t tackle our community’s housing challenges without using all the tools in our toolbox. Our affordable first-time homebuyer model at CHT, for example, isn’t the right answer for an unsheltered neighbor with an emergency housing need. But for a teacher who wants to live in the community where he teaches, a nurse who needs a shorter commute in order to be able to work a variety of shifts in the hospital, or a grocery store employee who doesn’t earn enough money to afford their increasing rent, our community land trust model of homeownership may be the right answer.

And what is perhaps most unique about CLTs is how we balance supporting individual first-time homebuyers with providing a valuable and ongoing investment in our community. Because our residents purchase their homes – using a traditional mortgage, just like on the private market – they earn equity over the time they own their homes. But because CHT retains ownership of the land the home is built on as well as the exclusive right to resell the home when the current owner leaves, the home remains a community asset, providing affordability over and over as it is sold and resold to qualified program applicants. If you’d like to understand the CLT model better, I encourage you to take a look at the whitepaper we published a couple months ago, which takes a deeper dive into how the model works.

Spending time working and advocating with my affordable housing peers – both CLT practitioners and those whose organizations serve different populations – gives me hope and renewed energy in a season when so many things feel so challenging. Thank you for being part of the important work we are doing together as a community!

Kimberly Sanchez, Executive Director