Mapping 30 Years of Affordable Homeownership with CLJ

To help preserve affordable homeownership, we mapped one of the oldest and largest shared equity land trust housing programs in the Northeastern US, in partnership with the Center for Leadership and Justice (CLJ) in Hartford CT. 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 present-day public assessor records to analyze trends. Nellie Conklin published her data story that mapped the general location of these single- and multi-family properties in the Hartford region, and compared CLJ’s program to similar homeownership initiatives across the Northeast. CLJ staff worked with Conklin to republish her map on their website. Note: to maintain privacy for individual homeowners, as requested by CLJ, we masked street addresses and removed zoom controls in the map below.

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