As part of the deal, the home will always be affordable. The lease between the homeowner and the nonprofit sets a fixed rate for the house’s appreciation, so that the homeowner builds equity while still keeping the price down for the next buyer.

The first community-land-trust home in the state of Texas is a one-story, mint green house with a wraparound porch in a quiet East Austin neighborhood where prices have skyrocketed in recent years. (A home across the street is currently listed for $859,000; it sold for $349,000 in 2010.)

Mary Ybarra bought the home for $150,000 in 2012, and pays $815 a month on her interest-free mortgage. (GNDC loaned her the money, since it was difficult to get a loan for a land-trust home.) At the time, nearby homes were going for $350,000, which would have been out of reach for Ybarra, a single mother who works as an administrator in an office.

“I would not have been able to get in that league—ever,” she told me, sitting on the porch. “But once the land trust came in, I knew I was on my way somewhere.”

GNDC bought the land where the house sits for less than $20,000 in 1989. When it sold the house to Ybarra in 2012, the land was valued at $120,000 and the house valued at $150,000. But rather than take the profit of the rising land prices, the nonprofit holds onto the land, keeping it affordable for future residents.

The idea of community land trusts isn’t a new one. The idea was first popularized in America as part of the civil-rights movement, when a community activist named Robert Swann decided to try and obtain a large piece of land for black sharecroppers to settle and develop. The backers of that land trust took inspiration from the Jewish National Fund, which at the time was buying up land and setting up settlements in Israel, and the Bhoodan Movement in India, which tried to persuade wealthy landowners to give some of their land to the poor.

Despite Swann’s success, the idea didn’t really take off in urban areas in America until the 1980s, when rapidly increasing real-estate prices began shutting many out of homeownership, according to Reinventing Real Estate: The Community Land Trust as a Social Invention in Affordable Housing, by James Meehan. Cities in states such as Massachusetts, California, and New York embraced the idea. The city of Boston even used eminent domain to clear a portion of land for a local land trust. There are currently 243 community land trusts in the country, the largest of which is in Burlington, Vermont, and leases land to about 500 owner-occupied homes.

But, elsewhere, the idea was slow to catch on. There are few areas more speculative than real estate, and the idea of setting a fixed value for a home’s appreciation made some advocates uneasy. Banks, unaccustomed to loans just for structures and not the properties they sit on, refused to give loans for land-trust homes. Tax assessors charged taxes for the properties based on similar properties in the area, not on the value of the homes as designated in the leases.