by Nellie Conklin
Last updated on December 6, 2024
for Data Visualization for Allwith Prof. Jack DoughertyTrinity College, Hartford CT, USA
Community land trusts (CLTs) are non-profit organizations that set out to provide affordable housing to the community that it serves. CLTs can also be leveraged in different ways like servicing land to be used for agriculture or small business purposes, but, CLTs frequently operate to supply housing at an affordable rate. CLT organizations acquire and oversee land which they lease to the community, outside of market pressures. These programs can offer different forms of affordable housing, some programs may acquire land to offer rental apartments to its users or offer opportunities for affordable homeownership. The typical CLT homeownership model operates by the nonprofit owning the grounds of the land and allowing individuals to purchase the structure that sits on the land at a below-market price, separating the ownership of the land and building. By purchasing a home through community land trusts, the homeowners will get a 99-year renewable and inheritable lease on the land. By agreeing to purchase the home at an affordable price, the homeowner also must adhere to the resale stipulations, a calculated formula that keeps the home affordable for the next buyer but also allows the owner to gain some equity on the home. CLTs have been important in establishing housing affordability and continue to be incorporated across communities.
The Center for Leadership and Justice is a non-profit organization working to address social injustices within the community. This organization first began in 1850 to respond to the challenges faced by poor and immigrant individuals in the Hartford area. CLJ has continued its legacy of activism and advocacy through the creation of a number of programs and initiatives that strive to empower community members. Under the Center for Leadership and Justice, the Urban Suburban Affordables (USA) program started. This is one of Connecticut’s community land trusts that was first launched in the 1990s and began as a collaboration with the Connecticut Department of Housing. Its primary goal is to obtain land and provide low and moderate-income families with affordable homeownership opportunities in Hartford and its surrounding suburbs. Today, the USA program encompasses over 211 properties in the Hartford metropolitan area, contributing to the efforts to increase homeownership. This data story will examine the prevalence of the USA homes across Connecticut and compare this program to other community land trust organizations to understand the size of the USA program.
There are 211 USA properties. The table below shows that out of 211 homes, only 25 are multi-family homes, and the remaining are single-family homes, which accounts for 186 of the properties. Hartford has the largest numbers of single-family and multi-family homes making it the town with the largest amount of USA properties. It has a total of 94 USA properties in the city, which is almost three times more than East Hartford, the town with the second-largest share of USA homes. Following East Hartford, towns such as Bloomfield, West Hartford, and Windsor show the most significant stock of USA homes.
Figure 1: Explore the datawrapper chart
This table helps identify where there is the most amount of access to USA's homes. Understanding where homes are located might help programs such as USA recognize where there is a need for affordable housing and where there is a surplus of affordable housing.
The map below uses data from the chart and visualizes the properties to show its geographical context in Connecticut. The properties appear mainly in the Capitol Planning region, with the exception of the USA home in Meriden. There is a big cluster of homes surrounding the Hartford area and a few outliers outside of this cluster in Meriden, Manchester, Ellington, and South Windsor.
Figure 2: Explore the interactive chart
Identifying where these outliers exist could be useful for CLTs in order to understand barriers to developing homes in certain towns or can help make comparisons about how CLT homes operate in properties located close to the city and those in far suburbs.
Since the map above is not zoomable in order to protect the privacy of residents who take part in the USA program, it makes it difficult to see more detailed patterns of the location of properties. In the map below, by focusing on the five towns with the greatest number of USA homes, the spatial trends of the properties become more apparent. The map below shows the five Connecticut towns with the greatest number of USA properties: Hartford, East Hartford, Bloomfield, West Hartford, and Windsor. In Hartford, there is a lack of USA homes in the central part of the city as well as on the east border of Hartford. However, there is a large clustering happening in the northwest and southwest corners of Hartford's boundaries. In East Hartford, the properties tend to be a little more spread across the town, there is a small amount of clustering happening in the northern part of the town, but overall the properties seem to scatter across the area. In Bloomfield, there are two main groupings, one is located on the border that neighbors Windsor, and the second is north on the border shared with Hartford. West Hartford's USA property clustering appears mainly on the east side of the town, next to the border with Hartford, and shows no properties located on the west. Finally, Windsor's USA home groupings appear to be in the northern part of the town. The towns surrounding Hartford, show a clustering near the city's boundary, with the exception of East Hartford, whose properties show a more spread-out pattern.
Figure 3: Explore the interactive chart
Locating the region of a town where properties cluster is important to understanding why a community land trust property is located in that region and how it impacts the trends within that area. For example, finding the clusters of USA homes can allow researchers to look at the program's impact on housing patterns like eviction rate, owner-occupied mobility, and more.
Comparing the size of CLTs is more difficult than at first glance.
The measurement of affordable housing stock is inconsistent between community land trusts. Some community land trusts use the number of housing units to tell a story about the size of their program, while other CLTs choose to provide information on the number of properties. A housing unit is a living space that can be occupied by a household, which means that in a rental apartment, there are multiple units available, and within a single-family house only one unit is available. Properties are defined as the structure that sits on the land, there could be many units within a structure, but a property is measured just by the building itself. These differences across CLTs can lead to varied interpretations of the data.
The Urban Suburban Affordables program is ranked the highest for homeownership properties in the region and ranked third in housing units. The table shows the three largest CLTs in the region based on housing units. The USA program has 211 properties within its program that are designated for purchasing, these are all properties that offer homeownership to its community. The 239 units represent the amount of households that can occupy the 211 properties. Community Land Trust of Cape Ann comes in first for housing units with 687 units available and Dudley Neighbors Inc. comes in 2nd for housing units. CLTs Community Land Trust of Cape Ann and Dudley Neighbors Inc. do not offer specific data about how many homeownership properties they have. This means that the units could be homeownership units or rental apartment units.
Figure 4: Explore the interactive chart
Housing units encompass both rental apartments and homeownership units. These two forms of affordable housing can have different benefits for the user. Rental apartments allow households to pay rent at a cheaper cost than purchasing a house. Homeownership offers the opportunity for the homeowner to build equity off of the purchase over time. These different types of housing can have different outcomes for the user. Identifying the different stocks of housing each CLT provides is important in looking at the various benefits users of the program can gain.
This map below shows the number of housing units within community land trusts in Connecticut and Massachusetts. A housing unit is a living space that is occupied by a household, rental apartments and homeowner units are both incorporated in this calculation. Using data from community land trust directories, the map shows that the Urban Suburban Affordables program has the third-largest number of housing units in the region. If you use the interactive chart to hover over each bubble, the map will show data about each CLT's housing unit and homeownership units. Out of all of the CLTs that provided information about homeownership units, the Urban Suburban Affordables Program had the greatest amount of units out of both states.
Figure 5: Explore the interactive chart NOTE: the * means that there are some uncertainties about the data
This map determines the size of each CLT based on the number of housing units it has. This measurement allows CLTs to identify an area of impact within their program, it gives insight into how many households it serves. The programs with the most amount of housing units like the Community Land Trust of Cape Ann, Dudley Neighbors Inc., and The Center For Leadership and Justice (Urban Suburban Affordables) can get a sense of how many people utilize this structure for affordable housing. CLTs can use this data to draw in community members and increase stakeholders within there program.
The data used throughout this web page came from Urban Suburban Affordables, Inc. This information provided the Trinity College Dataviz class with information about the addresses of USA properties within Connecticut. From this data set, Dataviz instructor, Jack Dougherty, cleaned up the data with his students by adding property assessor data and Zillow data columns. This spreadsheet mainly guided the second part of this project which was the "USA Properties: A Breakdown of Where USA Homes are Located" section. By inputting the coordinates of the USA homes into Datawrapper's symbol point map, the information created the final product of images 3 and 4.
For the section that compared the USA program to other CLTs, I used websites given to me by Jack Dougherty, which included different community land trust directories. I used two different directories to make sure that if there was missing information on one website I could use the other resource to collect data on other CLTs. After compiling a list of CLTs in Massachusetts and Connecticut, I went through each website to collect information on the amount of affordable units each CLT had. Since each organization has a different way of presenting its data, it was difficult to distinguish rental units from ownership units. The CLTs with asterisks represent uncertainty in the number of housing units and homeownership units. Some organizations only provided information about the number of properties but did not go into detail about whether it was a single-family or multi-family home, so I could not get a clear sense on how many units occupied the property. In image 4, the bubbles show overall housing units combined in order to create uniformity within data measurement, because a lot of CLT pages did not specify which ones were ownership units, so in order to draw a conclusion I used housing units because it provided more information.
admin. “Home.” The Center for Leadership and Justice, https://cljct.org/. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.
“Community Land Trust Directory.” Schumacher Center for a New Economics, https://centerforneweconomics.org/apply/community-land-trust-program/directory/. Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.
Community Land Trusts – Grounded Solutions Network. https://groundedsolutions.org/strengthening-neighborhoods/community-land-trusts/ . Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.
“National Land Bank + CLT Map.” Center for Community Progress, https://communityprogress.org/resources/land-banks/national-lb-clt-map/ . Accessed 3 Dec. 2024.