Increasing house prices and relatively stagnant wages have led to the need to rethink our strategies regarding housing. Of course, solving the root issue would be preferable — but if that’s not an option, easing the burden is a useful venture. There have been several recent innovations in methods to approach affordable housing.
A couple of them have been around for a while, but not necessarily targeted at affordable housing. These are government subsidies and grants and developer incentives. If you give people money or tax breaks to build or buy affordable housing, it’s going to become easier. Another that you may have heard of is micro-housing. You may dream of a large home, but the truth of the matter is that smaller houses are not only cheaper, but also more cost effective to build. The only reason they weren’t being built before is lack of demand.
There are also some options you may not be aware of, though. These are community land trusts (CLTs) and shared equity models. CLTs attempt to reduce the cost of homeownership by separating land cost from building cost — normally, a house and the land it’s built on are purchased simultaneously, but with CLTs, the land is owned by a trust and only the structure is sold, so it costs less to buy. A shared equity model allows a buyer to purchase only a portion of the ownership of a home, with the share owned increasing as the buyer accrues equity and uses it to purchase a greater share. This is somewhat similar to a loan, but carries less risk, with the downside being that the buyer doesn’t have exclusive legal ownership of the property.
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