Shared Equity Homeownership

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Over a year ago, the National Housing Institute (NHI) launched an on-going investigation of three models of housing tenure that use durable contractual controls to perpetuate the occupancy, eligibility, and affordability of homes that are owned and occupied by low- and moderate-income households: the community land trust, the limited-equity cooperative, and deed restricted housing with covenants lasting 30 years or more. “Shared equity homeownership” is the generic name that was chosen by NHI to describe this resale-restricted, owner-occupied housing. Phase One of NHI’s investigation was directed by John Emmeus Davis, a research fellow at NHI and a founding partner of Burlington Associates in Community Development. His findings are contained in a new report published by NHI (www.nhi.org) entitled Shared Equity Homeownership: the Changing Landscape of Resale-Restricted, Owner-Occupied Housing. A free download of the complete report is available here. (This is a revised, CORRECTED edition of the uncorrected proof that was distributed by NHI at the National CLT Conference in Boulder in July 2006.)

The general message of Davis’s report is that community land trusts, limited equity cooperatives, and deed-restricted, owner-occupied housing (and their variations) are part of a single sector in which the commonalities among these models are more plentiful than their differences. Indeed, at the macro level of public policy and at the micro level of programmatic design, most of the differences among these models tend to disappear. The report examines the rationale for shared equity homeownership (Chapter One), the history and prevalence of the models that make up this sector (Chapter Two), the design of the use and resale controls that lie at the heart of these models (Chapter Three), the state and municipal policies that either support or impede the expansion of this sector (Chapter Four), and the performance of this sector in delivering – and balancing – a variety of benefits accruing to individual homeowners and the larger community (Chapter Five). Presented here as well are profiles of nine local organizations that have made shared equity homeownership a reality in their own communities, including three CLTs: the Sawmill CLT (Albuquerque, NM), Time of Jubilee (Syracuse, NY); and the Burlington CLT (Burlington, VT), soon to be renamed the Champlain Housing Trust.