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, Urban Suburban Affordables Inc., 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. Teams of students, such as Jana Safy and Hameed Almukhtar, published data stories to highlight their findings with data visualizations. The co-authors tracked the sales transactions of a sample of 20 single-family shared equity land trust homes in Hartford since they were acquired beginning in the early 1990s. The median value of homes in this sample rose 253 percent over time, as shown by the blue line in the chart below. In addition, Safy and Almukhtar found that the median value of this sample of shared equity trust homes did not rise as fast as typical home sales in the region during the same time period. Overall, their finding supports CLJ’s efforts to support local homeownership while keeping resale prices affordable for the next generation of lower-income buyers.

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