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Issue #149, Spring 2007 |
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Issue #149, Spring 2007 |
Bringing Shared-Equity Homeownership to ScaleIntroduction by John Emmeus DavisOther Stories in this issue on Shared-Equity Homeownership and Asset-Building: City Hall Steps In: Municipally supported community land trusts boost affordable-housing stocks. The Purchase of a Lifetime: Low-income tenants in D.C. get in the game of snapping up property. A Winning Campaign: D.C. housing advocates win inclusionary zoning legislation. Epilogue: Toward a
Common Agenda for Growing Shared-Equity Housing
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With the publication last fall of Shared
Equity Homeownership: the Changing Landscape of Resale-restricted, Owner-occupied
Housing, the National Housing Institute completed the first
phase of a long-term project for documenting the performance, raising
the profile and increasing the scale of innovative models of affordable
housing that straddle the line between renting and owning. The best-known
examples of shared-equity homeownership are limited-equity cooperatives
(LECs), community land trusts (CLTs) and deed-restricted homes with
affordability controls lasting many years. These models hardly exhaust the field, however.
There are many ways to allocate the rights, responsibilities and benefits
of resale-restricted, owner-occupied housing, many possible designs
for the durable controls that regulate the use and resale of such housing
and many ways to structure the administrative entity that is charged
with monitoring and enforcing these controls over time. This lengthy
catalogue of organizational options has produced a landscape of unusual
diversity, where new models of shared-equity homeownership-or new permutations
of older models-appear on a regular basis. The malleability of these models is part of their
strength, for they can be readily tailored to fit a variety of locales
and to serve a variety of needs. There is a downside to so many variations,
however. They obscure what is common to them all, making it difficult
for the practitioners of separate models to learn from one another or
to work together to build popular understanding and public support for
this new approach to homeownership. In the articles that follow, comprising the cover
theme of this issue of Shelterforce, the authors explore the
challenges and efficacy of several shared-equity models being implemented
in localities around the country. We selected these particular stories
because they illustrate both the variety of shared-equity homeownership
and the quiet-but-steady growth of the sector as a whole. Arrayed side-by-side,
they also illustrate similarities of purpose and structure that exist
from one model to another, providing a glimpse of the common ground
on which a national agenda for expanding this sector might be founded. Copyright 2007 |
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