Miami breaks ground on 13 affordable Little Haiti townhomes on community land trust model

City and county leaders broke ground on a new townhome development in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood aimed at giving working-class buyers an affordable path to homeownership, though the project relies on a shared-equity land model that has left some longtime residents cautious.The project, named Place Louverture, will bring 13 permanently affordable townhomes to a corner lot along Northeast 67th Street.The development marks the first Miami-Dade County project for the South Florida Community Land Trust, a Broward-based nonprofit that helps first-time homebuyers and families displaced by South Florida's soaring housing costs. Under the community land trust model, buyers purchase the home itself at a reduced price while the nonprofit retains permanent ownership of the underlying land."The idea of that shared ownership is that the homebuyer, once they buy the home, can pay that same opportunity forward to somebody else like them," a project representative said.The groundbreaking comes a