CLTs Becoming Popular in Oregon
Story by The Oregonian, Published Feb 2, 2025
Nothing beats the Cascades alpenglow view from Dana Madison’s front porch in Bend.
The pink cast of the mountain range doesn’t get old, even after more than 40 years in central Oregon’s most populous city.
“It takes away my breath every morning,” said Madison, who works at a local Presbyterian church after her family business, a satellite television retailer, closed last year.
For low-income residents like Madison, the city’s views are becoming a luxury as home prices reach toward the mountaintops. The median Bend home most recently sold for $700,000, Beacon Appraisal Group LLC reported, and officials say many have left the city due to the escalating cost of living.
Madison bought her two-bedroom, two-bath home in May 2021 for $274,000. She pays just over $900 a month in principal and interest, benefiting not only from low pandemic mortgage rates — but also the fact that she doesn’t own the land she lives on, just the house.
The land is held by a so-called community land trust run by RootedHomes, a Bend nonprofit. The arrangement dramatically reduces Madison’s monthly mortgage payment in Bend, where a shortage of homes and an expanding population are driving up the price of homes — and most especially the cost of the land on which they sit.
Community land trusts are becoming increasingly popular in Oregon, one in a patchwork of partial solutions to a deepening housing-affordability crisis.
Madison said the land trust model was “the only hope that somebody like me had” as home prices skyrocketed.
“It just made it more affordable,” she said, “and therefore more accessible.”
RootedHomes started just over a decade ago as Kor Community Land Trust with a mission to build low-cost, energy efficient housing for local workers, according to cofounder Amy Warren, who recalled working for free for three years before the nonprofit scraped together enough money to hire her as executive director and buy some land to develop.
By the end of this year, Rooted hopes to have nearly 60 homes in Bend, and it is expanding into neighboring communities, said Jackie Keogh, who replaced Warren as executive director in 2021.
Land trusts are daunting to establish because someone must oversee their complex ownership structure in perpetuity, and existing trusts often struggle to expand because funding is limited.
Backers like Tony Pickett, chief executive of Grounded Solutions Network, argue that permanency is part of the appeal. Many forms of affordable housing developments have income-restriction mandates that expire after a few decades. Community land trusts, with deed restrictions that enforce their affordability and are meant to endure permanently, can serve more generations of families.
The trusts are “thriving, active, growing,” Pickett said, adding that a recent count showed more than 300 such programs in the U.S.
Pickett traces the origins of the community land trust model to the 1960s South, where Black sharecroppers leased land for their homes and farms. They lived subject to the caprices of white landowners who Pickett said often evicted the tenant farmers in retaliation for peaceful protests.
A group of civil rights pioneers raised money to go to Israel to study communal land ownership, Pickett said, and came back inspired to create what we now know as community land trusts. The first, established in Georgia, was at the time among the largest tracts of U.S. land owned by African Americans, he said.
Land trusts gained traction across ensuing decades as nonprofit and religious leaders grasped for new ways to make housing affordable for families experiencing poverty, Pickett said. Today, the largest is in Vermont, a trust championed by then-Burlington Mayor Bernie Sanders.
Families in community land trust homes tend to stay for five to seven years before moving on. Six in 10 residents will move into market-rate homes, Pickett said, citing a study from his group and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a testament to how a step up can facilitate economic mobility.
Denise Rowcroft doesn’t know if she’ll ever leave her land trust home, part of the Rooted at Crescita development near Pilot Butte, the hulking hill that dominates Bend’s eastern cityscape. She’s leaving that decision until at least her middle school-aged daughter, now 12, graduates from high school.
Bendite Denise Rowcroft opened her home at Rooted at Crescita to housing leaders, including Gov. Tina Kotek, for them to learn more about the community land trust model in mid-January.
At Crescita, she and her husband pay $2,200 a month for the two-story house they bought in 2023, rounding up to the nearest hundred to shave off time and interest on the mortgage.
Absent the land trust, the Rowcrofts would not have been able to own a house in Bend, Denise Rowcroft said.
“It literally felt like we won the lottery,” she said.
They are considered middle-income — Rowcroft works at an environmental nonprofit — so they pay more than four low-income families on the same lot, who generally spend about $1,300 a month.
On Jan. 15, the Rowcrofts opened their house to Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and others in town for a housing conference.
The family had mopped the floors and wiped down the fridge in anticipation of the state leader’s arrival. Guests either took their shoes off or slipped on blue plastic booties to respect the floors. Inside, Kotek zipped through the smaller than 1,000-square-foot house, exploring upstairs while journalists and policy wonks huddled at the entryway.
Keogh, the RootedHomes leader, guided the tour group on a circular path around Crescita, where a 99-year deed restriction, or “land lease,” keeps costs for the homes low. The land, owned by the trust, is leased for 99 years to the homeowner, allowing them to occupy the land in their house without owning it. That lease automatically renews, according to Keogh, so the effect is permanent affordability.
Jackie Keogh, executive director of RootedHomes, speaks with a group touring one of the group's community land trust developments in Bend. She joined Rooted in 2021.
Land trusts often limit how much equity a homeowner accrues. Rooted uses a “fixed-rate resale formula”: The owner’s equity equals 1.5% of their mortgage and any downpayment assistance grants, compounded at 1.5% per year.
Under that math, the average owner should expect to accumulate about $80,000 in equity after 10 years in their house if they paid $250,000 for the place and obtained $50,000 in downpayment assistance, Keogh told The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Money for the low-income RootedHomes developments comes from a state program called Local Innovation and Fast Track. The program, which funds both homeownership and rental housing for low-income residents, has been around for nearly a decade, and Kotek has proposed sending $700 million to build rentals and $100 million for for-sale homes in the upcoming budget cycle. The latter would include funds community land trusts could use to acquire land and pay for construction.
Oregon Housing and Community Services, the state housing-finance agency, stated that such an investment would create some 7,000 rentals and 500 owner-occupied homes for low-income Oregonians.
Delivering brief remarks outside the Rowcroft home, Kotek touted Crescita as an example of “innovation” in the LIFT subsidy program, highlighting the long-term affordability the land trust model encourages, “which is really important from the state’s perspective.”
Keogh moved her young family from Portland in 2021 to join the nonprofit. She’d worked at the Portland Housing Bureau, helping to craft policies intended to resituate residents with historical ties to North and Northeast Portland to that area. She later worked at Proud Ground, a Portland-area community land trust.
She sees the trusts as a worthy investment of the public’s money, because taxpayers and private donors — who tend to help cover the middle-income units — invest only once in community land trust to create permanent affordability “that will serve countless homeowners.”
RootedHomes plans to further expand outside Bend, to nearby cities including Redmond and Prineville. Those communities are growing rapidly, too, in part because former residents of Bend have relocated in search of affordable homes.
As home prices in Bend have risen in recent years, new housing-affordability measures are taking hold.Jonathan Bach I The Oregonian/OregonLive
But another reason the nonprofit is looking to other cities in central Oregon is that they’ve agreed to donate land and pay for streets, sewer pipes and other costly infrastructure typically paid for by developers.
“We just can’t really say no,” said Keogh, who suspects the local governments are eager to partner because housing affordability strengthens “the city’s economic backbone” by keeping teachers, nurses and other essential workers local.
Keogh said she believes more officials will soon see value in supporting community land trusts across the state. RootedHomes consults government agencies and nonprofits across the state that are interested in housing affordability and routinely hears — particularly in southern Oregon and on the coast — that they lack the capital to establish land trusts.
“Historically, land trusts were not always funded,” Keogh said, noting that states like Vermont have generally had more money available. “I think Oregon will get there.”
Story by The Oregonian, Published Feb 2, 2025-- Jonathan Bach covers housing and real estate. Reach him by email at jbach@oregonian.com