Charting 30 Years of Affordable Home Prices with CLJ

In partnership with the Center for Leadership and Justice in Hartford CT, we tracked the effectiveness of their shared equity land trust program, one of the oldest and largest home ownership programs of its type in the Northeastern US. Shared equity land trusts, also known as community land trusts, allow lower-income buyers to purchase a home while the trust maintains ownership of the land to block speculators and assure that future resale prices remain affordable. As a class project for my Data Visualization for All course in Fall 2024, students and I cleaned up CLJ’s dataset of 211 properties in this 30-year-old homeownership program, and linked the data to public assessor records to analyze trends. Jana Safy and Hameed Almukhtar published their data story, where they researched prices for a sample of homes in CLJ’s Urban Suburban Affordables (USA) homeownership program. Median home prices in this sample rose 253 percent since they were acquired by CLJ, as shown by the blue line in Figure 1 below.

But CLJ median home sales prices did not rise as high as typical home sales in the metropolitan region during the same period, as shown in Figure 2 below. Overall, this finding supports CLJ’s efforts to boost local homeownership while keeping resale prices affordable for the next generation of lower-income buyers.

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