Advancing Shared Equity Homeownership as a Tool for Sharing Property and Power Justly
Shared equity homeownership is a self-sustaining subsidy model for achieving affordable homeownership. Stable and affordable homeownership is an important way to build long-term wealth, increase a sense of agency, and create a path to economic security for individuals, communities, and future generations.
This brief is designed to provide a primer on contextualized case making for shared equity homeownership, describing the continuum of impacts for households and communities associated with the model (among them, affordability, community governance, and racial equity). The brief concludes with a discussion of the opportunities for philanthropy to expand equitable homeownership via shared equity models through system change, investment, and direct support.
Shared equity homeownership is a self-sustaining subsidy model for achieving affordable homeownership. It is part of a dynamic field of affordable homeownership and collective ownership models that emerged from community-based organizations and municipalities over 50 years ago, during the civil rights movement. Shared equity homeownership is growing as part of system change movements (e.g., the solidarity economy) that aim to redistribute power and resources.
Access to safe, affordable, and sustainable homeownership has been and continues to be challenging in different ways for people of color, women, people living in rural communities, and those with intersecting
identities. Racist and discriminatory policies and practices have denied people of color access to land, housing, wealth, and security. These policies included forced removal from land, redlining, restrictive covenants, lending discrimination, and disinvestment.
Shared equity homeownership is one tool to meet the demand for homeownership, increasing the accessibility of homeownership for families of all races, ethnicities, and income levels by creating lasting affordability. At the same time, shared equity homeownership can provide a critical pathway to economic security and community power.
Benefits of Shared Equity Homeownership
Affordability
Stability
Community Preservation
Community Ownership
Wealth Building
Racial Equity
CALL TO ACTION FOR PHILANTHROPY
1. Directly Support Shared Equity Homeownership Models
Philanthropy can provide the resources shared equity homeownership programs need to succeed. Such support includes multiyear operating grants and capital to run organizations and implement programs.
2. Create an Enabling Environment
The real estate market is complex, and shared equity homeownership can make it even more complex. Philanthropy can help make the environment more enabling by investing in policy advocacy efforts and narrative change. Philanthropy also could support the field with capacity building and connection through national intermediaries.
3. Reinvent Systems
Philanthropy can continue to build on the critical support it has already provided for economic security and mobility as it moves toward investing in a more equitable economic system. This effort is about holistically supporting shared equity homeownership programs while committing to building the power of communities to have a say over their futures and disrupting processes that reinforce inequity.
Conclusion
How we think about and support homeownership matters. A home is essential for survival and well-being. Yet, homeownership is increasingly unaffordable for working households in the face of rising house prices, limited affordable housing stock, lagging incomes, and expensive and inflexible financing.
The lack of access to affordable homeownership is amplified for Black, Latinx, Indigneous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Southwest Asian, and North African people and immigrants to the United States, groups burdened by widening wealth inequality and a long history of exclusion from economic security across multiple systems.
This publication was sponsored by:
