Champlain Housing Trust
The largest community land trust in the United States, and the best-known example of the tripartite board. Burlington, Vermont, since 1984.
The Story
Burlington in the early 1980s was doing what a lot of small cities were doing: watching its modest housing stock get bought up, flipped, and priced out of reach of the people who already lived there. Bernie Sanders was mayor. The city had a little money, a lot of political will, and a problem that no single program was going to solve.
What they built instead of another program was an institution. The Burlington Community Land Trust (later merged with a housing nonprofit to become the Champlain Housing Trust) would buy land, hold it forever, and sell only the houses on top of it, with a resale formula that kept the homes affordable for each next owner. The trust wouldn’t be controlled by the city, or by the residents alone, or by the wider community alone. It would be run by all three, sharing a board in equal thirds — the tripartite structure.
Four decades later, Champlain holds more than three thousand homes across northwestern Vermont, has been studied endlessly, and in 2008 received the UN World Habitat Award. The tripartite board is now the default template taught to every new CLT in the country.
Why the Thirds Matter
A board where residents hold a majority will, over time, vote to weaken the resale formula — every individual resident has a rational interest in cashing out. A board where outside funders or the city hold a majority will, over time, drift toward whatever the funders or the city currently care about. A board where general community members hold a majority can lose touch with what it’s actually like to live under the ground lease.
Three equal thirds means no faction can move the institution alone. Every real decision has to find agreement across people whose interests genuinely differ. That is slow, and it is the point. The slowness is the durability.
What They Actually Do
Champlain is not exotic. It buys land, builds or rehabs housing, sells or rents the homes, collects ground-lease fees, does stewardship visits, enforces the resale formula when people move, runs homebuyer education, and keeps the books. It is a boring nonprofit. That is also the point — the romance of intentional communities tends to burn out. A CLT is designed to keep running after everyone who founded it is gone.
Further Reading
- Community Land Trust — the concept
- Champlain Housing Trust — https://www.getahome.org/
- International Center for Community Land Trusts — https://www.cltweb.org/
- The Commons
- Cooperation Jackson — a Black-led CLT-plus-coops model in Mississippi
The boring institution outlasts the charismatic project.