One Roof helps 36 families buy homes, prevents 29 evictions

Affordable housing in Duluth and St. Louis County is still hard to find, but One Roof Community Housing says its 2025 work kept 36 families in the homeownership pipeline and stopped 29 evictions before they turned into displacement. At its Annual Member Meeting on Wednesday, May 13, the nonprofit put a hard number on a year that mixed construction, counseling and loan help in a market where stable options remain scarce.

The strongest signal came from the Community Land Trust program, which moved 36 households into homes in 2025, matching its all-time annual record. That total included 14 new construction homes, 10 acquisition rehabs and 12 resales. One Roof said those buyers purchased homes at an average of $104,000 below market value, a gap that matters in a city where too many working families are priced out before they can even begin looking.

The land trust now stewards 385 permanently affordable homes and has served 640 households overall. More than 260 CLT resales have recycled more than $25 million back into future homes, giving the model a built-in way to keep affordability from disappearing each time a house changes hands. Under the structure, One Roof keeps ownership of the land while homeowners buy the house and lease the ground for a small fee, a setup meant to keep ownership within reach for households that would otherwise be shut out of the market.

One Roof’s Tenant Landlord Connection program showed the same pressure from the rental side of the market. The program worked with 789 households in 2025, including 655 tenants and 134 landlords, and helped 29 households avoid eviction. That kind of intervention can be the difference between keeping a job, keeping children in the same school and avoiding the long-term damage that comes with displacement. One Roof also closed 87 loans, helping 52 homeowners stay in their homes and enabling 36 families to become homeowners.

The group’s public materials say its down payment and closing-cost assistance is available to income-eligible households buying within Duluth city limits, another sign that the need for help is concentrated close to home. One Roof Community Land Trust was formed in 2012 when Neighborhood Housing Services and Northern Communities Land Trust merged, and its board includes 16 members with representation from low-income neighborhoods and CLT homeowners. In a housing market still squeezing families across the Twin Ports and the North Shore, the question is not whether these programs help. It is whether they are moving fast enough to meet the scale of the crisis.