A simple, stubborn idea: housing is a stewardship problem, not a market problem. We hold homes in permanent community trust — never to be flipped, refinanced, or removed from the affordable pool.
Affordable housing isn't a market problem with a market solution. It's a stewardship problem — and stewardship requires permanence.
For sixty years, "affordable housing" in this country has meant temporary subsidies attached to private property. A developer takes a tax break to build a hundred units; thirty years later the affordability covenant expires, the units flip to market rate, the building is "lost." We've built and re-built the same affordable inventory three times since 1965, and the country has fewer truly affordable homes today than when we started.
The community land trust model fixes the bug. Land is held in a nonprofit trust, in perpetuity. Homes built on the land are sold or rented at half the regional median, with permanent affordability covenants that cannot be removed by any future owner. A house built today will still be a Your Business home in 2125.
The model is older than we are — Cooperative Homestead in Detroit pioneered it in 1969; the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington has been doing it since 1984. What's new is doing it at scale, in a non-coastal, mid-market region, with a legal structure that survives founder transition and has been pressure-tested by twelve years of weather.
By 2026, 118 homes are in the trust. By 2030 we expect 250. The slope of that curve is the only number that matters here.
Every home is sold or rented at no more than 50% of the Hudson Valley regional median. The cap is enforced by a deed-recorded covenant that runs in perpetuity — not 30 years, not 50, not until the bond expires. Forever.
The land underneath every home is owned by the Your Business Community Land Trust, a separate 501(c)(3) entity. Homeowners hold the building, lease the land. The trust never sells the land — by its own bylaws, no sale is possible.
Six of the twelve seats on the Your Business board are reserved, by design, for current or former Your Business residents. They are not advisory — they vote. Every major operating decision passes through resident board members.
If a Your Business homeowner sells, the price is set by formula — original purchase price plus the lower of: (a) regional CPI inflation, or (b) 1.5% per year. The seller keeps any equity from improvements they made; the housing affordability stays.
The trust has the first right to buy back any home offered for sale. In twelve years we've exercised it 7 times — usually when an heir wanted to sell out-of-trust. We pay the formula price, find the next family, the home stays in.
Every buyer (and every renter) of a Your Business home is income-qualified at the time of purchase or lease — no more than 80% of the regional median. The covenant requires the same of every future buyer.
A Your Business home cannot be bought by an LLC, a partnership, an investment trust, or any non-natural person. Owner-occupied only. This is the single covenant that has prevented the most loss in our peer trusts elsewhere in the country.
Homeowners hold a 99-year ground lease on the land, automatically renewable for another 99 years. The lease costs $1/year. The trust never raises it. The land never sells.
I started Your Business in 2014 because I had spent the previous decade watching affordable housing be built and then quietly disassembled. The pattern was always the same: a developer would secure a tax credit, a covenant would attach for thirty years, and at year thirty-one the building would flip to market rent. The neighborhood would lose what it had been promised. The taxpayer would be asked to fund the next round of construction in another neighborhood.
That model is not a housing solution. It is a subsidy treadmill that keeps the construction industry employed and never accumulates a stock of permanently affordable homes. After thirty years on the treadmill, we should have a country with fifty million units of affordable housing built up since 1965. We have less than ten million.
The community land trust model is older than I am, and it is not novel. What is unusual is the willingness to apply it at scale in a region like the Hudson Valley — neither pure city, nor pure rural, full of people who would rather not see their towns become museums for second homes.
If you've read this far, you've already done the work of taking permanence seriously. The hard part now is funding it. Two-thirds of our budget comes from individual donors; the rest comes from foundation grants and the rental income of the buildings we steward. There is no government check that funds this work; there is only the check you write, and the relationships we keep with you.
The bridge keeps because somebody chose to keep it. Thank you for choosing.