Harris County is moving families into permanently affordable homes through community land trust

As rents surged at the end of 2021, Tashare Reed decided that, if she could, she wanted to buy a house. To her, homeownership represented stability — she could set down roots someplace without fear of getting priced out by rising rents. But as a bus driver for the University of Houston, she wasn't sure she could afford a home. She reached out to a real estate agent to find out. Her real estate agent pointed her to a new Harris County program specifically designed to make homeownership a reality for families earning below 80 percent of the Houston area's median income, adjusted for household size — for example, less than $63,800 for a family of three. The Harris County Community Land Trust brings homes within arm's reach for such families by placing the land the house sits on into a trust. That dramatically reduces the homebuyer’s purchase price (since they are only paying for the cost of the structure) and stabilizes the family’s tax bills (since owners do not pay taxes on the land, the portion of the taxable value most likely to climb as a neighborhood grows in demand).

Now, through the program, Reed lives in a new construction, three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom house with a two-car garage in Crosby. She couldn't be happier. "I've always wanted to own my own house," she said. "To have something that's mine for my own kids." Now she, her 10-year-old and her 18-year-old each can use a separate bathroom — a luxury after renting. The county is the latest group to turn to the community land trusts as a way to create permanently affordable homeownership for people with low incomes. The Houston Community Land Trust has been serving people earning as little as 40 percent of the region's median income, or $35,000 for a family of four, since 2019, although its future funding is uncertain. And on San Antonio's West Side, a nonprofit in a historically Hispanic community is starting a land trust to fight gentrification by preserving and rehabilitating older houses that will be sold or rented to those earning less than 30 percent of the area's median income, or roughly $25,000 for a family of three.