Houston wanted to lead the nation in long-term affordable housing. Now it’s backpedaling.

A home purchased through the Houston Community Land Trust, a nonprofit organization created in 2018 that aims to make homeownership affordable for low-income households, sits in Acres Homes in Houston, on Dec. 14, 2022. Despite its goal of creating more than 1,000 permanently affordable homes in five years, the land trust has only 136 homes in its portfolio so far. The city of Houston has cut its funding significantly. (Credit: Callaghan O'Hare for The Texas Tribune)

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Four years ago, as Houston recovered from Hurricane Harvey, city leaders turned to a decades-old model devised by civil rights activists and Black farmers to create permanently affordable homes at a scale and pace that no one had ever tried before.