Stable, affordable housing is essential to individual and community well-being. It provides safety and security and serves as a firm foundation for achieving life goals. Without a stable place to call home, families cannot move out of poverty and put themselves and their children on a path to a stronger economic future.
Yet in many communities, rising housing costs, limited land availability, and market-driven development are pushing out long-term residents. New housing is often built to meet short-term financial objectives rather than long-term community needs, leaving families vulnerable to displacement and communities at risk of losing their social and cultural fabric.
Communities can shape development in many ways. But when they have greater access to land, they can strengthen their ability to plan for the long term — supporting affordability, stability, and alignment with local priorities.
Community-led development is one approach communities are using to respond to these challenges.
What Is Community-Led Development?
Community-led development places residents and local organizations at the center of planning, building, and maintaining housing in the communities they call home. Rather than responding to market pressures alone, this approach emphasizes long-term affordability and shared responsibility over time.
Unlike traditional real estate development — where decisions are often driven by external investors and short-term financial returns — community-led development is guided by the needs and priorities of residents. Nonprofits frequently play a central role, helping to ensure housing remains accessible to people who have historically been excluded from the benefits of homeownership.
Providing Land for Community Stewardship
While resident leadership is essential, it is often constrained by a fundamental barrier: access to land.
In high-cost and land-constrained markets, rising land prices and profit-driven buying can make it difficult for communities to shape development outcomes on their own terms. When land remains subject to pressure to raise prices quickly, even well-intentioned housing efforts can struggle to remain affordable.
Community-led housing models are most effective when land is held outside profit-driven real estate markets and stewarded by mission-driven organizations accountable to community needs.
Communities can shape development in many ways, but land oversight can strengthen their ability to plan for the long term—supporting affordability, stability, and alignment with local priorities beyond short-term market cycles.
Community-Led Development in Practice
Community-led development is not a single blueprint. It takes different forms depending on local context, community priorities, and available resources. What these approaches share is a commitment to resident leadership and stewardship.
Community land trusts are one of the most established and widely used models. This involves a nonprofit or trust holding land on behalf of a community, then renting or selling homes on the land at affordable rates. By separating land ownership from homeownership, land trusts help remove the cost of land from housing prices, preserving affordability for generations and protecting communities from displacement, particularly in expensive housing markets.
Several Foundation grantees use the community land trust model to preserve affordability and prevent displacement in ways that reflect local needs.
For example, following the 2023 Maui wildfires, Lahaina Community Land Trust aims to rebuild housing that will be affordable in perpetuity, ensuring residents can remain on the island. On Kauaʻi, two nonprofits — Kauaʻi Housing Development Corporation and Kauaʻi Habitat for Humanity — plan to develop affordable housing that will include a land trust component, as is grantee Permanently Affordable Living Hawaiʻi.
In Baltimore, South Baltimore Community Land Trust is working with residents to create permanently affordable housing without displacement. Through the renovation of vacant homes and the construction of new homes on vacant land, the organization is expanding housing opportunities while ensuring long-term affordability.
Community-led development can also take other forms.
- Housing cooperatives allow residents to jointly own or manage their housing, the shared costs of which make the upfront home costs more affordable. Together, residents share decision-making and property responsibilities. For example, in Maryland and several other states, CSI Support and Development offers this model for senior housing.
- Neighborhood real estate investment trusts (REITs) enable residents to collectively invest in local real estate, helping keep economic benefits within the community.
- Land disposition agreements (LDAs) enable community-driven, neighborhood-scale revitalization when a city designates a lead developer to coordinate redevelopment across vacant and neglected properties in a defined area. LDAs signal a city’s long-term commitment to reinvestment and give residents confidence that momentum will be sustained over time. In Baltimore, the Foundation has supported ReBUILD Metro, which uses LDAs to engage residents in long-term planning and has helped rehabilitate nearly 40 abandoned homes and restore 3.5 acres of parks and playing fields.
The Role of Philanthropy in Community-Led Development
While communities are at the center of this type of development, bringing these projects to life requires resources and capacity that communities may not be able to access on their own. Philanthropy can play an important role in advancing community leadership by helping to address these challenges.
Philanthropic support is most effective when it strengthens long-term stewardship rather than short-term results. This can include funding for predevelopment activities, such as acquiring land, conducting environmental studies, or retaining technical expertise, as well as supporting nonprofit loan funds that expand access to capital for community-based developers.
Land grants are another tool that can help promote community-led development. By transferring land to mission-driven, community-rooted nonprofits, such grants can support housing solutions that remain affordable over time.
Land grants are one of several ways to support community-led development — and when aligned with strong local leadership and governance, they can serve as a powerful catalyst.
Why Community-Led Development Matters for Long-Term Well-Being
At its core, community-led development is about more than housing. It is about stability and ensuring that long-term residents can remain in the places that shape their lives.
Community-led development recognizes that communities themselves are best positioned to understand their own needs — and that lasting outcomes are most likely when decision-making power remains close to home.
Learn about the Kauaʻi land grant and the organizations leading this work.
Learn more about the Foundation’s focus on housing and its strategies to help communities thrive.
