A new community land trust experiment

Now, this genuinely could be a wonderful thing:

King County, Washington opens a pilot program today to rehab a HUD home with the help of Habitat for Humanity. Interestingly, the home will be sold to "a deserving local family" but the land will remain in the hands of the Homestead Community Land Trust. Community land trusts are a really interesting way to help a household build equity rather than paying rent, while also leaving a public service entity in control of the property in question and ensuring that much of the value of a subsidy will stay with the property when the resident homeowners (who own the structure only, not the land) are ready to move on into a market-rate home purchase. For more information see the Web site of the Institute for Community Economics, which is the mothership organization for the community land trust mechanism.