BUILDING TRUST
Early last year, Regina Daniels decided it was time to buy a house. She’d been renting a three-bedroom apartment off Antoine Drive in Houston’s Acres Homes neighborhood, an area she’s loved ever since her family moved there when she was in high school. “It’s homey,” she says. “Neighborly.” Unincorporated until 1974, Acres Homes was originally marketed to black Houstonians as “a bit of genteel country,” named for the acre of land you’d get with your house. Though it’s just 20 minutes northwest of downtown, the neighborhood is quiet, sheltered by stands of pine trees and the occasional farm.
But the rent at Daniels’ apartment was about to go up again—she was already paying $1,200 a month—and she was tired of moving her three kids to a new place every time it did.
So she started looking at houses in the neighborhood, where the median list price had climbed above $200,000. “I was going to have to make some major sacrifices,” Daniels says. “I was going to end up mortgage-broke.” She considered Habitat for Humanity, but it wasn’t building in the area. One day, Daniels got a call from a friend, who told her about the Houston Community Land Trust (CLT), a newly formed nonprofit selling affordable homes in the neighborhood.
Within two months, Daniels had moved into a brand-new three-bedroom house just south of Little York Road.
On a humid night in October, her 5- and 6-year-old sons, Matei and Keeland, wriggle around the living room and list all the things they love about their new house. Matei likes the backyard, where there are three trees, where sometimes the ball goes over the fence, where he steps on ants and stares at the clouds in the sky. “I can tell you which weather it is,” he says, proudly.
Daniels pays $725 a month for her home, $675 of which goes to the bank for the 30-year mortgage on the house. The remaining $50 goes to the Houston CLT for the 99-year ground lease on the land, which the nonprofit owns.
It doesn’t bother Daniels that she doesn’t own the land under her house. “It used to be the only thing I could think about was which money I was going to move around in order to take care of things,” she says. Now she can think beyond her next payment—to save for retirement, to pay for the braces her daughter needs.
Texans have seen the cost of housing skyrocket over the past decade. As a result, populations of “at-risk groups”—low-income residents and black and Hispanic families—have declined in city
