Resale-restricted, owner-occupied & affordable

The National Housing Institute (NHI) is an independent nonprofit organization that examines "key issues affecting affordable housing and community development practitioners and their supporters...housing, jobs, safety, and education, with an emphasis on housing and economic development." An NIH 2006 study, jointly funded by the Surdna and Ford foundations, examines shared equity homeownership. The study focuses on "limited equity cooperative; the community land trust; and deed-restricted homes with durable covenants regulating their occupancy, eligibility, and affordability." The author writes:

Public policy has been a key factor in determining where alternative models of homeownership will thrive. Below the federal level, the three policies most favorable to the growth of shared equity homeownership are durable affordability, subsidy retention, and equitable taxation. Where these policies are lacking, resale-restricted housing tends to be in short supply.

Density allowances can be too low, subsidies too meager, and the political will too weak in the face of community resistance to develop, market, and manage resale-restricted, owner-occupied housing.

However, the study continues:

Well over a hundred community land trusts exist across the country, from Burlington, Vermont to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Limited equity cooperatives, although predominantly an urban housing type, have become a more widely used vehicle for building stable homeownership and preserving affordability in mobile home parks from New Hampshire to California. With the dramatic growth in inclusionary housing during the past decade, tens of thousands of shared equity condominium units have been created across the country...

Shared Equity Homeownership - The Changing Landscape of Resale-Restricted, Owner-Occupied Housing
by John Emmeus Davis, Research Fellow, National Housing Institute
(2006, pdf, 158pp/1.2MB)

Preface available in HTML.