Reference
What is a community land trust?
There is more than one answer, and in July 2026 one of them changed. This page gives the plain answer, the statutory one, and the distance between them.
Last reviewed against Public Law 119-101 and the current United States Code.
A community land trust holds land so that the homes on it stay affordable to one family after another.
The family buys the home and owns it. They build equity in it, they can pass it on, and they can sell it. What they do not buy is the land underneath, which the trust holds and does not sell. Taking the land out of the price is what makes the home reachable in the first place.
A ground lease — usually ninety-nine years, usually renewable — sets out what happens next. When the family sells, a formula written into that lease decides the price. The formula gives them a real return on what they put in, and keeps the home affordable for the household that comes after. The subsidy that made the first purchase possible stays in the home instead of leaving with the first seller.
That is the model as it was built, and as most community land trusts still practise it. It is not, as of July 2026, what federal law requires. The rest of this page is about the difference.
What a definition cannot carry on its own.
A statute can say what an organization must be. It cannot say whether the promise will still be keepable in year thirty. Five things decide that, and stewardship sits at the top of them because it is the one that has to still be working when everyone who set it up has gone.
The key beside the diagram notes how federal law treats each one. Every line of it is taken up in full further down this page.
For thirty-four years, federal law described the model the way practitioners had built it.
This is the part most people have never read, and it is hard to find now: the subsection was struck in July 2026, so the current Code no longer carries it. It is worth reading, because the 1992 definition and the practice described above are not two things. They are the same description, one written by organizers and one written by Congress.
the term “community land trust” means a community housing development organization (except that the requirements under subparagraphs (C) and (D) of section 12704(6) of this title shall not apply for purposes of this subsection)—
(1) that is not sponsored by a for-profit organization;
(2) that is established to carry out the activities under paragraph (3);
(3) that—
(A) acquires parcels of land, held in perpetuity, primarily for conveyance under long-term ground leases;
(B) transfers ownership of any structural improvements located on such leased parcels to the lessees; and
(C) retains a preemptive option to purchase any such structural improvement at a price determined by formula that is designed to ensure that the improvement remains affordable to low- and moderate-income families in perpetuity;
(4) whose corporate membership that is open to any adult resident of a particular geographic area specified in the bylaws of the organization; and
(5) whose board of directors—
(A) includes a majority of members who are elected by the corporate membership; and
(B) is composed of equal numbers of (i) lessees pursuant to paragraph (3)(B), (ii) corporate members who are not lessees, and (iii) any other category of persons described in the bylaws of the organization.
42 U.S.C. 12773(f) · added by the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992, Pub. L. 102-550 · struck in full by Public Law 119-101 § 501(v)(12)(B), 11 July 2026
Line by line, it is the practice
Why this matters for what follows. Because the 1992 definition and the practice were the same description, the 2026 replacement is not a departure from a technicality in federal law. It is a departure from the model itself. Everything in the next three sections follows from that.
On this text. The subsection was struck from the Code, so it is no longer available from the usual places. The reproduction above is quoted from endnote 35 of Grannis (2021), which quotes Pub. L. 102-550 directly; it matches every fragment we retrieved independently from the United States Code 2023 edition. For any filed or counsel-reviewed use, pull it from a Code annual edition and confirm it character for character.
What federal law now says, in full.
This is what replaced it. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act did not restate the 1992 definition; it wrote a different one and struck the original. Read the two together and the distance is the whole story. The text below is quoted complete so this page can be used as a source rather than taken on trust.
(26) The term ‘community land trust’ means a nonprofit entity, a State, a unit of local government, or an instrumentality of a State or unit of local government that—
(A) is not managed by, or an affiliate of, a for profit organization;
(B) has as a primary purpose of acquiring, developing, or holding land to provide housing that is permanently affordable to low- and moderate-income persons;
(C) monitors properties to ensure affordability is preserved;
(D) provides housing that is permanently affordable to low- and moderate-income persons using a ground lease, deed covenant, or other similar legally enforceable measure, determined acceptable by the Secretary, that—
(i) keeps housing affordable to low- and moderate-income persons for not less than 30 years; and
(ii) enables low- and moderate-income persons to rent or purchase the housing for homeownership; and
(E) maintains preemptive purchase options to purchase the property if such purchase would allow the housing to remain affordable to low- and moderate-income persons.
42 U.S.C. 12704(26) · added by Public Law 119-101 § 501(r) · enacted 11 July 2026 · 140 Stat. 914–915
What each clause actually requires
One tension worth noticing. Subparagraph (B) and the opening of (D) both say permanently affordable. Subparagraph (D)(i) then measures that as not less than 30 years. The statute uses the word and then supplies a term of years as its meaning. That gap is where most of the real decisions get made.
This is a removal, not an omission.
It would be easy to read the new definition as simply quiet on governance — as though Congress had never addressed it. Congress addressed it in detail, for thirty-four years. The same act that wrote the new definition struck the old one.
1992 – 2026. Membership open to any adult resident of the area. A majority of the board elected by that membership. Equal numbers of lessees, non-lessee members, and others named in the bylaws.
Today. Struck in full by Public Law 119-101 § 501(v)(12)(B). Nothing replaced it. A community land trust may now be governed by anyone.
Nothing stops an organization from governing itself this way, and most established community land trusts still do. What changed is that the practice is now a choice the organization makes and has to explain, rather than a condition federal law imposed.
The CLT change is not isolated.
One section of one act loosened community-accountability requirements in four separate places. A fifth thing was left untouched while the reason for its existence was removed somewhere else. Read together, the pattern is clearer than any one of them.
42 U.S.C. 12773(f) · struck by § 501(v)(12)(B)
The CLT definition that carried community control for thirty-four years, removed entirely.
42 U.S.C. 12704(6)(B) · amended by § 501(b)
One word struck from the definition of a community housing development organization. Accountability to low-income community residents survives; the qualifier that gave it weight does not.
42 U.S.C. 12771(a) · amended by § 501(s)
The HOME set-aside no longer requires a CHDO to own or develop anything. What counts as materially participating is left to the Secretary, who has not yet said.
42 U.S.C. 12771(b) · rewritten by § 501(j)
A route for the set-aside to stop being a set-aside.
24 CFR 570.204 · community-based development organizations · not amended
The CBDO’s distinctive value was that it could carry out new housing construction when other CDBG subrecipients could not. With a general construction authority now on the books, the reason to route work through a community-based organization narrows sharply — without a single word of the CBDO rules being changed.
Four loosenings and one quiet obsolescence, inside one act. Pointing in the other direction: the new CDBG construction authority is tied by cross-reference to section 215 of the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act, and section 215 was itself amended to recognise shared equity ownership, community land trusts, limited equity cooperatives and community development corporations as mechanisms that maintain long-term affordability. Construction dollars are, by statute, pointed at permanent-affordability structures.
Three definitions of the same two words.
None of them is the last word. The first column is what the model was built to do. The second is what federal law asked for from 1992 until July 2026. The third is what it asks for now. Requirements that were lost are struck through; the one requirement gained is in green.
One more consequence worth naming: there is now a single federal definition where there used to be two. Section 233 carried its own, and § 233(b)(6) was amended to point at Section 104 instead. The long-standing complaint that HUD programs defined a community land trust inconsistently has been resolved — by consolidating on the newer and looser of them.
What all of this means for a particular program is the next question, and it has two different answers.
Two questions, and they have different answers.
Pick the shape closest to the program you are looking at. The first verdict is what the statute says, which is a matter of fact. The second is what we think will actually happen, which is a judgment and is labelled as one.
Meets the federal definition at 42 U.S.C. 12704(26)?
Yes
Meets every element, and exceeds the thirty-year floor by design.
Meeting the definition is a floor, not a goal.
Will the promise still hold?
Yes, by design.
Perpetuity is written into the lease, the people who live there sit on the board, and stewardship is somebody’s actual job rather than a line in a work plan.
PermAffai’s view, not a legal test
Meets the federal definition at 42 U.S.C. 12704(26)?
Yes, federally
A unit of local government is named in the definition. Every element can be met with no community governance whatsoever.
Meeting the definition is a floor, not a goal.
Will the promise still hold?
Only while someone keeps it.
Nothing in the structure outlives an administration. Thirty years is a floor the next council can read as a ceiling, and the homeowners have no seat at the table where that gets decided.
PermAffai’s view, not a legal test
Meets the federal definition at 42 U.S.C. 12704(26)?
No
Fails subparagraph (D)(i) — the affordability period must run not less than thirty years.
Meeting the definition is a floor, not a goal.
Will the promise still hold?
No.
It expires, and on the day it does the subsidy leaves with whoever happens to be selling. Nobody was ever assigned to notice.
PermAffai’s view, not a legal test
Meets the federal definition at 42 U.S.C. 12704(26)?
Yes
Meets the definition. Whether it is a community land trust in the older sense turns on the governance question the statute no longer asks.
Meeting the definition is a floor, not a goal.
Will the promise still hold?
Likely, if stewardship is funded.
The lease terms are built to last. The risk is that stewardship competes with a development pipeline for the same staff, and the pipeline usually wins.
PermAffai’s view, not a legal test
Meets the federal definition at 42 U.S.C. 12704(26)?
Depends
The entity qualifies. Whether it meets (D) and (E) depends entirely on what the disposition documents say.
Meeting the definition is a floor, not a goal.
Will the promise still hold?
Usually not, as written today.
Most conveyances put a home into private hands at a discount and stop there. The public investment leaves at the first market sale, which is the thing permanent affordability exists to prevent.
PermAffai’s view, not a legal test
Meets the federal definition at 42 U.S.C. 12704(26)?
Depends
An instrumentality of a unit of local government qualifies. The enforcement instrument under (D) is the open question.
Meeting the definition is a floor, not a goal.
Will the promise still hold?
Better odds than most.
Compliance monitoring is already institutional muscle here, and stewardship is the component hardest to build from nothing. What is usually missing is the instrument, and that is the easier half to fix.
PermAffai’s view, not a legal test
These are shapes, not rulings. A real answer comes from reading the actual ground lease, covenant, resale formula and program guidelines, and nothing on this page is legal advice.
We think the best community land trust is a community one. We are not the only ones with a say.
There is more than one definition, and some of them do not do the job.
The statute is one answer. The movement that built the model is another. A twenty-year deed restriction with nobody assigned to watch it is a third, and it is the one that fails — not because it breaks a rule, but because the home does not stay affordable and nobody finds out until it is gone. We argue with definitions on those grounds, not on grounds of orthodoxy.
Community control is the point, where you can get it.
People who live with a decision should have a hand in making it. Open membership, elected seats, homeowners on the board: these produce better formulas, better policies and better odds that the organization is still trusted in thirty years. Federal law no longer requires any of it. We still recommend it, and we will say so to anyone who asks.
We respect the law of the land, and the right of a city to act directly.
A county commission that wants to build permanent affordability through its own housing department is not doing something illegitimate. It is using an authority Congress has now explicitly given it, usually because no community organization in the jurisdiction is in a position to carry the work. Treating that as a lesser form of the model helps nobody and leaves the program worse designed than it needed to be.
So long as stewardship holds and community voice is maximized, we are for it.
Our test is not what the entity is called. It is whether someone is answerable in year thirty, whether the people living in the homes have a real way to be heard, and whether the subsidy is still working when the second family moves in. Where those three hold, we support the effort — in every clime and place.
Meeting the definition is a floor, not a goal.
Thirty years is what the law asks. Nothing stops a program from choosing perpetuity, seating homeowners on its board, or funding stewardship properly, and the programs that last are the ones that chose. The definition tells you where the bottom is. It does not tell you where to build.
Three situations, three different next moves.
You run a community land trust today
Your ground lease almost certainly exceeds the new floor, so compliance is not your issue. The issue is that the word now covers programs built very differently from yours, and funders will stop being able to tell the difference from the label alone. What you can show — monitoring current, resales priced correctly, obligations met — becomes the thing that distinguishes you.
Stewardship Systems →You are a city or county standing something up
You now meet the definition in your own right, without a nonprofit intermediary. That removes a barrier and hands you a set of choices the statute no longer makes for you: how long, what instrument, who sits at the table, and who is answerable once the staff who built it have moved on. Those are decisions to make deliberately rather than inherit.
Technical Assistance →You hold subsidy and want to know what it did
Whatever the definition says, the question underneath is the same: how much public investment went out, how many households it has served, and what is still recoverable. Our free tool runs that for a single home in about four minutes. The Portfolio Review runs it across everything you hold.
Try The Long Dollar →What nobody can tell you yet.
This page is current as of the date at the top. These are the questions we are watching, and we would rather name them than let the page imply more certainty than exists.
- What the Secretary will accept. Subparagraph (D) requires the enforcement measure to be “determined acceptable by the Secretary,” and the new CLT purchase authority operates “under terms determined by the Secretary.” HUD has issued neither. Until it does, what satisfies (D) is genuinely open.
- What “materially participates” means. The HOME set-aside test now turns on it, and the Secretary has not defined it.
- Whether CBDO-routed construction sits outside the 20% cap. The statute and 24 CFR 570.204 now overlap, and HUD has not reconciled them. We have seen this question answered confidently and wrongly, by conflating the construction cap with the separate planning-and-administration cap. They are different limits.
- Whether the act expands what administrative dollars can fund. Section 501(t) restructures the HOME program administration provision. We have not obtained the pre-amendment text, so we make no claim about it either way.
- How the field responds. Whether practitioners adopt a working distinction between organizations that practise shared governance and programs that do not, now that the statute no longer draws one.
If you find any of this out before we do, or think we have read something wrong, tell us. We will correct the page and say what changed.
Every statutory quotation on this page was taken from the public law text or the current United States Code, not from a secondary summary. Several widely circulated summaries of this act contain errors on exactly these provisions.
- Public Law 119-101, 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, 140 Stat. 846, §§ 204, 501(b), 501(j), 501(r), 501(s), 501(v)(12)(B). Enacted 11 July 2026 without signature.
- 42 U.S.C. 12704(26) — the current definition.
- 42 U.S.C. 12773(f) — the prior definition, added by the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992, Pub. L. 102-550, and struck in 2026.
- 42 U.S.C. 12704(6)(B), 12771(a) and 12771(b) — the community housing development organization provisions.
- 42 U.S.C. 5305(a)(28) and 24 CFR 570.204, 570.207(b)(3) — the CDBG construction authority and the community-based development organization rules.
- Wyman, M. (2025, October 22). Community land trusts: Understanding the full model for lasting affordability. Housing Action Lab at the Florida Housing Coalition. https://flhousingactionlab.substack.com/p/community-land-trusts-understanding
This page describes federal law as we read it. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for counsel licensed in your jurisdiction reading your own documents.