\u201cIt\u2019s like an anti-displacement strategy, in which you are empowering the community to steward the land \u2014 but also make decisions on what happens in the land,\u201d said Georgette G\u00f3mez, a former San Diego City Council member and now the group\u2019s community development officer.<\/p>\n
![\"Lisa](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/SUT-L-CASA-HOUSING-009-1.jpg\")
Lisa Cuestas, CEO of Casa Familiar, center, along with local and state officials and project partners, break ground on Avanzando Community Land Trust on Cypress Drive in San Ysidro on Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025. (Meg McLaughlin \/ The San Diego Union-Tribune)<\/p>\n
Under a community land trust, a nonprofit buys a piece of property for a housing development, with the help of financing like loans and public or private grants. The nonprofit then leases the land for the housing on top of it for 99 years.<\/p>\n
Land trusts are typically a community-led effort, where residents and others invested in the neighborhood\u2019s well-being are the ones governing the trust.<\/p>\n
The housing is affordable because the nonprofit takes the cost of land out of the equation. And unlike traditional deed-restricted affordable housing that only has to be income- and rent-restricted for 55 years, land trusts remain permanently affordable \u2014 because they include a resale agreement that limits equity gains and requires it to stay affordable in perpetuity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe land is valued for its use instead of its market value,\u201d said Josh Newton, an urban studies postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego.<\/p>\n
Casa Familiar\u2019s community land trust will offer 103 affordable rental homes and plans to eventually offer a down payment assistance program to help residents buy theirs.<\/p>\n
The development will also include climate-resilient elements such as rooftop solar and shaded outdoor areas to reduce urban heat impacts and improve air quality.<\/p>\n
The Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, or PANA, is developing a community investment trust \u2014 similar to a land trust, but different in that it seeks to generate equity gains for its participants. It plans to create<\/a> about 150 homes and allow residents and business owners to become shareholders.<\/p>\n The project, which would also include community spaces and a village market tailored to support immigrants and refugees, was granted $5 million<\/a> in May by the county to support its development.<\/p>\n Community land trusts have been slower to catch on in San Diego County than in other parts of the state that have more robust land trusts.<\/p>\n But organizers are excited about how neighbors have joined to make alternative housing options more of a reality in San Diego.<\/p>\n \u201cWe engaged 2,000 people total through this whole process \u2026 It\u2019s the most amazing thing,\u201d Rachel Lozano Castro, the director of strategic partnerships and development at PANA, said in April. \u201cI feel really lucky that we\u2019ve got a really cool model in San Diego, even though San Diego can\u2019t recognize a cool thing under its nose.\u201d<\/p>\n Community leaders say the need is there.<\/p>\n According to a May report<\/a> from the California Housing Partnership, nearly 130,000 low-income renter households in San Diego County can\u2019t afford their home. And while San Diego\u2019s vacancy rates recently hit the highest<\/a> in a century, rents remain stubbornly high, with an average asking rent at $2,583 a month in late June \u2014 up 0.5% in a year.<\/p>\n Officials are also pursuing housing alternatives. The city of San Diego recently committed<\/a> $8.5 million to a fund to preserve low-rental apartments, which complements a 2025 city law that requires apartment owners to give the city first right of refusal when they decide to sell.<\/p>\n Over just the last decade, the number of community land trusts has tripled in California, says Lydia Lopez, the executive director of the California Community Land Trust Network. About 50 current and emerging community land trusts are in the statewide network, which provides resources to community land trusts and advocates for state funding.<\/p>\n In 2021, California established a fund and pledged $500 million to help community land trusts and tenants acquire property to preserve it as affordable housing \u2014 but the money never came through<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now the California Community Land Trust Network is pushing for $200 million<\/a> to fund a similar program<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of CLTs are struggling to acquire these properties, because as a nonprofit, it\u2019s even more difficult to fundraise now,\u201d Lopez said. She added that some foundations that historically supported this work are pulling back following the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to dismantle diversity and equity initiatives.<\/p>\n But even though they agree community land trusts bring benefits, some advocates of more aggressive housing development argue the model is difficult to scale and can\u2019t yet make much of a dent in California\u2019s massive shortage of affordable housing.<\/p>\n Finding sustainable, recurring sources of funding is one challenge. Another is that it takes a lot of work \u2014 mobilizing a community to launch a land trust or co-op nonprofit and ensuring it continues to operate, without losing sight of its mission, over the course of decades.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want a community-based governance of your home, that is going to require everybody to be engaged in a way that maybe not everybody is ready for yet,\u201d said Krishna Hammond, a member of the board of YIMBY Democrats of San Diego.<\/p>\n The nonprofit leaders say that beyond ownership and affordable housing, they want these models to help promote community.<\/p>\n Casa Familiar\u2019s Avanzando development in San Ysidro is built near the La Semilla Community Resiliency Center, intended as a refuge from extreme weather, as well as near a transit stop \u2014 infrastructure it says will help connect residents with each other and the services they need.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole idea is to create a healthy, vibrant community that is safe, that is walkable, that is accessible,\u201d G\u00f3mez said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elyd\u00e9 Arroyo remembers the Barrio Logan of 35 years ago, before sky-high rents pushed out many families and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[23,100,74,76,75,1696],"class_list":["post-396498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-top-stories-sdut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/sut-l-refugee-hub-01.jpg\")
A rendering of the planned Refugee and Immigrant Cultural Hub. (Courtesy of PANA)<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/sut-l-tierras-indigenous-001.jpg\")
The headquarters of Tierras Ind\u00edgenas Community Land Trust on National Avenue in Barrio Logan on Friday, July 10, 2026. (Kristian Carreon \/ The San Diego Union-Tribune)<\/p>\n