Tag Archives: cooperatives

Social Housing, Federal Style

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U.S. Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) and Representative Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently introduced the Homes Act which would establish a Housing Development Authority. The HDA is based on the Social Housing Development Authority bill introduced in New York earlier this year.

I was on a panel that discussed the pros and cons of the New York bill. The recording of the panel can be found here.

More specifically the federal bill would

  • Establish a national Housing Development Authority to acquire and develop real estate to create and maintain a stock of permanent, sustainable, affordable housing, including single- and multi-family housing, with robust tenant protections.
  • Empower local communities to address their specific housing needs by financing real estate acquisition or conveying property to public housing authorities, mission-driven nonprofits, tenant- or resident-owned cooperatives, state or local governments, and community land trusts.
  • Require the housing development authority to maintain portfolio-wide affordability by setting aside 40% of units for extremely-low income households and 30% of units for low-income households.
  • Cap rents for units financed under the Act at 25% of a household’s adjusted gross income and cannot increase more than 3% per year.
  • Support homeownership by allowing residents to purchase homes under shared equity models and providing relief to mortgage borrowers at risk of foreclosure due to market instability or economic distress.
  • Provide workers with strong labor protections building this new housing.
  • ​​Provide tenants with opportunities to come together to purchase their buildings prior to large, for-profit developers buying them.
  • Provide funding to rehabilitate and address the backlog of necessary improvements for public housing and repeal the Faircloth Amendment to allow new public housing.
  • Authorize $30 billion in annual appropriations, combined with a revolving loan fund to recoup and reinvest funds back into housing. Annual appropriations include a 5% minimum set aside for Tribal communities and a 10% minimum set aside for rural communities.

(This is from AOC’s press release, linked to above.)

Sharing Your Home with Strangers

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Debra Bechtel, Crystal Liu, Ernira Mehmetaj, and I have just posted Sharing Your Home with Strangers: Common-Interest Ownership and Financing Options to SSRN (as well as to bepress). The abstract reads,

As the affordable housing crisis in the U.S. escalates, housing policy analysts and advocates are re-examining, modifying, and combining ways of decreasing the costs of homeownership through shared owner-ship and shared financing while also, in some instances, preserving long-term affordability. This Article will touch upon the vast array of models and take a deep dive into one of them, the relatively new shared equity financing model. That model holds some promise and a lot of peril for homeowners.