Welcome to Diamond State CLT

Delaware’s statewide community land trust

Homeownership changes lives.

Homeownership contributes to families’ and communities’ economic stability and growth. For children, homeownership is tied to success in school and life.

Unfortunately, housing costs in Delaware have placed homeownership out of reach of many hard working families. Throughout our state there is a growing gap between the buying power of people’s wages and the cost of a quality home.

This is where DSCLT comes in. Formed in 2006, Diamond State Community Land Trust is helping families own homes at prices they can afford. DSCLT invests funds in every transaction, “buying down” the purchase price of the homes.

DSCLT homeowners gain equity and financial stability, and Delaware gains homes that are affordable for generations to come. We serve families in all three Delaware counties - Kent, New Castle, and Sussex.

DSCLT serves families earning household incomes at or below 80% of Area Median Income (AMI) based on family size.
See County by County Income Limit Chart.

DSCLT News and Views

National CLT Conference, Athens, Georgia, October 27-30

CLTs are featured in Slate Magazine's online publication "The Big Money"
Why you should give up your land by Nik Steinberg

CITI Announces Community Development Grant to Help Sussex County

New York – The Citi Foundation today announced that Sussex County is among 20 communities across the country where the Foundation is providing funding to local community development organizations. The funds will help these organizations implement innovative physical development and rehabilitation projects – known as “place-based initiatives” – that champion the long-term or large scale revitalization of low- and middle-income communities. Read the press release...

President Obama announces the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan - February 18, 2009. The Plan includes a number of measures to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, refinance unaffordable mortgages, as well as more Neighborhood Stabilization Program funding to restore and re-sell vacant, foreclosed homes, plus other funding for affordable housing, weatherization, and energy efficiency measures. See these sites for more details:

http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/tg33.htm

http://www.financialstability.gov/

Taking Shared Equity Homeownership to Scale A Federal Demonstration of a New Approach to Sustainable Homeownership -- January 14, 2009

The National CLT Network, NCB Capital Impact, the Ford Foundation, and many other groups are proposing this new program to the Obama Administration. The proposal is to invest 125 million in a demonstration project benefitting 5000 households. This project would test and document the viability of shared equity homeownership - a promising new approach to creating and preserving affordable homeownership and asset-building opportunites for millions of American families. Shared Equity homeownership represents a safer and more sustainable approach to affordable homeownership that , if adopted widely, could provide families with meaningful alternatives to the risky subprime financing that contributed to the foreclosure crisis and resulting economic meltdown. Read the article...

Diamond State CLT Finalizes its First 10-Year Business Plan for 2008-2017

OUR GOAL: 350 Permanently Affordable Homes in 10 Years

Today, Delaware has 320,000 households. By 2017 this is expected to increase to 365,000.  About 100,000 of current households, 1/3 of Delaware’s population, falls in the income ranges served by DSCLT. Of these 100,000 households, 44,000 are “cost-burdened.” That is, they pay more than 30% of their incomes for housing. Many of these households could benefit from owning a community land trust home. Read more in our July newsletter...

What Foreclosure Crisis? Community Land Trusts Offer Secure Homeownership

The current foreclosure crisis that is sweeping our country illustrates how vulnerable homeowners are—especially low- and moderate-income households. Some reports estimate that over 40 percent of foreclosures are occurring with homeowners who had good, 30-year, low-interest loans in place before they got caught up in the refinancing frenzy promoted by many mortgage providers. Unwisely, many homeowners switched their stable mortgages for other mortgage products that were, simply put, too good to be true.

In addition to the families that refinanced, there are many others now facing the prospect of foreclosure. Some people bought homes they could not afford as their primary residence betting that the rapid escalation in home values would continue. Others bought second and third homes expecting to resell within a short time-frame and realize a quick profit.
Read the entire article by Van Temple on www.rooflines.org

Homeownership Done Right
By David M. Abromowitz, Baltimore Sun, November 17, 2008

During the presidential campaign, the housing debate sometimes had more to do with how many homes a candidate owned than about solutions to the nation's housing crisis. At other times, specious claims were made that the current foreclosure crisis was caused by Fannie Mae, or by policies started in the 1990s to get banks to expand homeownership lending to low- and moderate-income families. More...