Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.
•••
Every Minnesota politician running for mayor, governor, the Legislature and the U.S. Congress continues to pound the podium and declare the lack of affordable housing one of the biggest problems facing their electorate. Yet they offer no solutions and continue to fail to address the problem. Multiply this by 50 states. Why? Are politicians poorly advised, do they honestly fail to understand the problem, or do they understand the problem but are afraid to say it out loud?
Housing affordability is described very accurately as two lines on a graph: 1) the relatively flat growth in median income and 2) the much steeper growth in median home costs. Put these two lines together, and therein lies the housing affordability problem. In 1990 the gap between median home price and median income was $50,000. In 2025 that gap stood at almost $300,000. Neither of those two lines on the graph developed accidentally or in the last several months or years. Both lines — income and home prices — are the byproducts of our economic system, which has been built brick by brick over decades. Income inequality in this country has grown over the past 50 years (see the Gini Coefficient, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). At the same time, the housing market has developed into an increasingly financialized system completely untethered from the housing needs, and reach of, over half the population.
Housing affordability is a systemic problem and will require systemic change to fix it. With more than 100,000 “affordable” housing units needed in Minnesota, the current methods of addressing the problem will never solve it. Most of the programs in place today, in Minnesota and every other state, are designed to subsidize lower-income families so they can afford to rent or buy “market rate” housing. This ensures that we will be talking about this problem for the next 50 years.
How do we put housing within reach for the more than half of families today who are priced out of the market or forced to pay too large a portion of their income on rent or a mortgage payment? The best model for making housing affordable today is the Community Land Trust (CLT) model.
CLTs are widespread but little understood. They are nonprofit entities that buy land and set it aside in perpetuity as a location for people to build affordable single-family homes or multifamily structures. There are more than 300 CLTs operating in almost every state. The CLT controls the value of the structure that can be built on the property. It must be affordable for lower-income earners, usually defined as some percentage of median income. The homeowner owns his house but not the underlying real estate. This is the systemic change required.
Eliminating the land from the purchase price of the home lowers the cost by 30% or more. By keeping the land out of the private real estate market, speculation on the land value is immediately ended. No developer, corporate investor or retail investor will ever look at that property as a speculative asset that they can extract a windfall gain from in the future; no Airbnb, no house flipping, no attempts to gentrify a neighborhood and pocket capital gains on the houses. And when the homeowner goes to sell the house, which he or she owns, the resale price is capped at a number that will make the house affordable for the next lower income buyer. The homeowner will gain some appreciation in his “affordable” house, but it is limited. The next homebuyer will be able to afford the house because it will still be priced “affordably.”
