FROM SARAH GEER, PRINCIPAL, RAINWATER CHARITABLE FOUNDATION AND AFN MEMBER
KATIE SIRAKOS, SAN ANTONIO AREA PROGRAM OFFICER, ASSET FUNDERS NETWORK
AUGUST 2025

AFN Short Take is a blog series highlighting insights and perspectives from recent AFN programming events.

Reflections from the Texas Statewide CLT Summit

Community land trusts (CLTs) are gaining momentum across Texas as a promising solution to the state’s deepening housing affordability crisis.

A CLT is a nonprofit organization that acquires and holds land, often in perpetuity, to provide permanently affordable housing and other community uses.

By separating land ownership from homeownership, CLTs help stabilize costs for low- and moderate-income families while preserving affordability for future generations. Homebuyers own their homes but lease the land beneath them from the CLT, creating a shared-equity model that prioritizes long-term community benefit.

On June 4, 2025, AFN’s San Antonio Area, Central and North Texas chapters co-hosted the first-ever Texas Statewide CLT Summit, bringing together seasoned practitioners, emerging leaders, funders, and municipal partners. The event highlighted the growing relevance of CLTs, the barriers they face, and the critical role philanthropy can play in supporting lasting affordability through community-rooted solutions.

Why CLTs Matter Now: Local Strategies Amid a Statewide Crisis

Across Texas, housing costs are climbing faster than wages, displacing longtime residents and putting homeownership out of reach for many working families. A third of Bexar County homeowners are housing cost burdened, spending over 30% of their income on housing. And a decade ago, 80% of homes in Fort Worth were affordable to a median-income family; today, that number has fallen below 20%. These trends are limiting economic mobility and eroding generational stability.

In cities across Texas, CLTs are gaining traction:

  • Fort Worth launched its citywide CLT two years ago. Supported by a robust multi-sector stakeholder group that includes the Rainwater Charitable Foundation, the trust holds over 15 acres and is working with Community Housing Development Organization (CDHO) partners to bring more than 400 units online in the next four years.
  • Houston’s CLT began in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey to resist speculative land grabs. It now supports more than 200 households and is expanding its model to include tiny homes, ADUs, and a repair program for aging properties.
  • San Antonio is home to three emerging CLTs founded by community-based organizations, each embedded in neighborhoods facing rising displacement. The city backs their work with a $150 million affordable housing bond and tailored procurement policies.
  • In Austin, Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation (GNDC) pioneered the CLT model in Texas over a decade ago and continues to lead with over 30 homes completed, 85 in the pipeline, and partnerships with the University of Texas School of Law and other local CLTs to share legal, financial, and counseling resources.
  • Numerous other Texas communities—such as Dallas, Waco, McKinney, and Taylor—also participated in the June 4 summit, reflecting the rapid expansion of CLT efforts across the state from early-stage exploration to more established groups scaling their impact.

These efforts reflect the diversity and adaptability of the CLT model, spanning disaster recovery, housing preservation, grassroots action, policy-enabled solutions, and housing as inclusive asset building. As Chanda Gaither from the City of Austin noted, “The CLT model gives us a variety of ways to get to affordability.”

The “C” in CLT Requires Deep Investment

Unlike many traditional housing models, community land trusts have ongoing, substantial accountability mechanisms in place for the communities they serve. A tripartite governance model, deep resident engagement, and long-term support for homeowners distinguish CLTs from conventional land trusts.

Desmond Watley-Calloway from the Houston CLT explained the difference simply: “Are you providing a subsidy, or are you building community? Because if it’s the latter, it requires more resources, more relationships, and more commitment.”

That commitment shows up in stewardship programs—funds set aside to help families with maintenance and repairs, post-purchase support, and compliance systems that protect both the home and the subsidy. Rachel Stone of GNDC noted that her organization collects $35/month from homeowners into an escrow fund. “It’s not a huge amount, but it’s there when someone needs to replace a roof or cover an insurance deductible,” she said.

CLTs help families move from surviving to thriving, and they contribute to neighborhood stability, with research showing lower foreclosure rates than market-rate housing. A 2020 analysis from Rutgers University found that neighborhoods with higher concentrations of CLT homes saw stronger stabilizing effects. That kind of long-term impact doesn’t happen by accident.

Several speakers warned against treating stewardship as an afterthought; the time to build capacity for it is before the first home closes.

Flexibility and Collaboration Drive Local Success

CLTs thrive when they are deeply local, but they also benefit from shared learning and infrastructure. Multiple speakers emphasized the importance of flexible support such as legal clinics, shared services, and technical assistance providers, especially for emerging CLTs or groups in rural areas. National organizations like Grounded Solutions Network and place-based efforts like the Austin Community Land Trust Accelerator Program are helping expand the technical assistance pipeline, offering emerging CLTs the support they need to grow with integrity, equity, and community vision.

In San Antonio, partners like LISC San Antonio are working to align board training and organizational development efforts. Nonprofits across regions are also exploring innovations in shared services models, particularly shared housing counselors, and cross-organization learning cohorts to extend limited resources. “We’re not competing,” Stone emphasized. “We’re trying to raise the sea level for all of us.”

Flexibility is also key in funding. Organizations cited the importance of unrestricted grants, technical assistance dollars, and the ability to combine housing resources with workforce, childcare, education, or behavioral health strategies.

In places like Fort Worth, funders helped connect the dots between citywide data on displacement and community-led housing development, making the case for broader alignment.

Housing as a Core Strategy for Economic Mobility

At the Rainwater Charitable Foundation, our journey into housing started with a simple but powerful realization: students can’t thrive in school if they don’t have a stable place to live. We saw families forced to move multiple times a year, commuting long distances just to stay enrolled in the schools they valued. That insight pushed us to expand beyond our historic focus on the education sector.Post-pandemic, we began investing in the built environment, workforce development, and housing. One housing project we considered cost more than our entire annual grants budget. That forced us to ask: where can our capital be catalytic? We explored program-related investments (PRIs), recoverable grants, and other tools to stretch beyond traditional grantmaking.

Ultimately, we reframed our work in terms of asset-building for families and communities—not just through education credentials, but homes, land, social capital, and workforce-ready skills. CLTs have become a key part of that inclusive wealth-building strategy, and AFN has been instrumental in helping us frame this evolution.

Through our engagement, we’ve come to see how education, housing, and workforce all align around the same North Star: generational economic mobility.

What Philanthropy Can Do Now

CLTs aren’t a panacea, but they are a proven, powerful tool to preserve affordability, resist displacement, and center community in the wealth-building process. Funders who care about economic mobility, racial equity, and long-term impact have a critical role to play. Here are five ways to begin:

  • Invest in infrastructure, not just units. Fund stewardship, staff development, legal services, and back-end systems that make CLTs sustainable.
  • Support shared services and peer networks. Help CLTs pool resources and knowledge, especially in rural or under-resourced areas.
  • Deploy patient and flexible capital. Use PRIs, recoverable grants, or low-cost loans to help acquire land and support pre-development.
  • Back enabling policy. Fund advocacy and technical assistance to support appraisal reform, zoning, and public land disposition.
  • Center resident voice. Align funding and hold partners accountable to prioritize deep community engagement, participatory governance, and ownership pathways for low- and moderate-income households.

As one panelist powerfully reminded the audience—quoting researcher Heather Way—“The best time to invest in CLTs was decades ago. The second-best time is today.”

For funders looking to explore additional resources, we recommend: AFN’s 2024 brief on shared equity housing models, the Community Land Trust Toolkit from The University of Texas at Austin School of Law; and the Community Land Trusts in the U.S. Map from Grounded Solutions Network.

This blog is based on insights shared during a recent event hosted by the Asset Funders Network.