The Challenge
In states across the Deep South, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit developers are incentivized to build or rehabilitate scattered-site single-family homes with lease-to-purchase options. If no residents or local nonprofits are able to purchase the properties, developers are able to convert them to market-rate housing.
Thousands of LIHTC developments in the region are nearing expiration. In some communities where they are located, one in four Black people live in poverty. Unable to purchase their home, thousands of families face the threat of displacement. HOPE’s innovative mortgage product is designed to prevent people from losing their homes when the tax credits expire and to help close the region’s 30% gap between Black and white homeownership.
How it Works
HOPE’s Securing Homeownership innovation builds on an existing in-house mortgage product that has had success creating pathways to homeownership for historically underserved homebuyers. The new bespoke product will offer down-payment assistance and require no private mortgage insurance. Loans are manually underwritten and borrowers are assessed based on their rental payment.
Starting with a pilot in the Mississippi Delta, HOPE will employ their innovation with “rent-to-buy” LIHTC developers and conduct proactive homebuyer education with renters. At the same time, they will promote their mortgage product regionally and nationally. HBCU students from Mississippi State Valley University and Delta Design Build Workshop will retrofit homes with energy upgrades. Data collection and research will show state and federal stakeholders the power of ensuring long-time renters have opportunities to build generational wealth through homeownership.
The Challenge
Among the Tribal citizens served by Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority, 70% are renters. In contrast, renters make up 36% of the population in the state of Alaska and nationwide. Until the Tribes collectively agreed to make homeownership a key priority in 2019, no new affordable housing had been built in the villages in 20 years. While Tribal citizens across Southeast Alaska own land, it has remained undeveloped for years.
Success Starts With Me allows landowners to build on their land and keep it under Tribal ownership. People who have thrived on this land since time immemorial will gain access to homeownership and invest in the well-being of their neighbors and the economic growth of their communities.
How it Works
Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority serves 14 Tribes across small village communities accessible only by boat or air. The authority is partnering with Haa Yakaawu Financial Corporation to offer Tribal citizens throughout Alaska’s southeastern panhandle a personalized pathway to homeownership. Tailored down payments, mortgages, and sweat equity options meet potential homeowners’ unique profiles. A foreclosure mitigation plan protects again the unspeakable threat of loss of Tribal land.
Training and education are key components of Success Starts with Me. The innovation prepares homebuyers every step of the way – because where other financial institutions see risks, the housing authority and its partners see opportunities to build and retain a strong Tribal community in Southeast Alaska.
AIA Conference on Architecture & Design
The Challenge
Homeownership built the middle class in the United States and remains the way most households generate wealth. Yet home prices are out of reach for many buyers of color. The result is ever-widening racial wealth disparity, undermining economic mobility, health and quality of life for families of color.
Rather than relying on scarce public and philanthropic subsidies to close the gap, the Homes for the Future Fund creates affordability with impact investment. It unlocks a new, scalable path to growing homeownership using a market-driven approach.
How it Works
Grounded Solutions Network’s innovation is designed to benefit families of color who have historically been barred from homeownership. The Homes for the Future Fund has its roots in community land trust and shared equity models that emerged during the Civil Rights movement as a way for Black people to gain control of land and farms so they could exercise their right to vote.
The fund acquires rental homes in climate-safe locations and places them in portfolios that will ultimately transfer to community-based organizations. The fund maintains homes as rentals for up to 10 years. Home appreciation and monthly rental payments reduce the loan balance and equity accumulates.
At the right tipping point, homes sell to families at 20% below market absent public subsidies, while investors recoup their initial investment plus a small return. The remaining equity becomes a down payment. When the home is sold, the shared equity model ensures that it will remain affordable in perpetuity, building wealth over time.
The Challenge
Modular factories are typically located hundreds of miles from the communities they serve. This outsources construction jobs and limits access to innovative building methods. It also adds challenges and costs for transporting oversized loads across multiple states. These barriers make it hard for developers in cities to employ modular housing solutions.
Opening a modular factory also requires significant capital. New modular construction facilities can cost up to $40 million and occupy several acres of land. In addition, most modular facilities focus on single-story housing. Developers struggle to deliver the prefab product needed for many cities, including accessible and visitable multistory housing with energy-efficient systems.
How it Works
The Last Mile Network features a centralized factory – a production hub in Pittsburgh – that builds different home parts and a circuit of modular micro facilities in disinvested communities. Parts ship on standard trucks to smaller factories within a 30-minute drive of the communities served where they are assembled into boxes to produce the final product: an all-electric home that’s built 40% faster and is 80% more energy efficient. Standardized components and designs create efficiency and can be adjusted to fit a community’s needs and aesthetics.
Local workforce development programs provide residents in communities of color an entry to well-paying construction jobs. The Last Mile Network factory workers also gain an equity stake in the business and down-payment assistance to buy a home they create. Plans to scale the innovation entail doubling the Pittsburgh hub’s capacity and opening new micro facilities in Maryland and Virginia. The projected impact of that expansion includes 170 jobs and 400 homes a year, generating $120 million in revenue for Black-owned businesses.
The Challenge
Millions of families live in older multifamily buildings that are extremely costly to operate and maintain. Building owners spend huge amounts of resources fixing crumbling facades and old carbon-spewing heating. The planet pays the price and so do residents – in higher utility bills, poor ventilation, and dangerously high and low temperatures in the summer and winter months.
Barriers to retrofitting include high costs with little return on investment for property owners. An even greater hurdle is the fact that the buildings are occupied. On-site construction and rehabilitation create major disruptions in residents’ lives, who often must be relocated during major retrofits.
How it Works
Thinking Outside the Box integrates a new heating, cooling, and ventilation (HVAC) system powered by electricity into an insulated outer shell. The shell is anchored to the building using prefabricated modular panels that can be customized to reflect a community’s culture and aspirations. The retrofit occurs on the exterior of the building, so residents can remain in their homes while the work occurs.
Hydronic Shell will pilot its technological approach on a section of a four-wing multifamily property in Syracuse, N.Y. The team aims to show how their sustainable innovation is a scalable turnkey solution for replacing soon-to-be-obsolete boiler systems, decarbonizing and modernizing thousands of multifamily buildings, and creating healthier, more comfortable homes for residents.
The Challenge
For too many African American youth in Birmingham, financial literacy and stability take a backseat to survival. All six of the city's open-enrollment public high schools are deemed failing by the Alabama Department of Education and less than 10% of students graduate ready for college or careers.
Build UP aims to break the cycle of poverty through a scalable housing innovation that ensures young people have the credentials, skills, and agency to realize transformative, liberating wealth.
How it Works
The innovation defies Birmingham’s history of racial injustice and is rooted in the belief that true equity occurs when people have a stake in their communities. Donated homes from affluent areas are relocated and renovated as infill housing in neighborhoods where new construction has been economically impossible for decades. The approach reinvigorates neighborhoods, eliminates construction waste and prioritizes green technology.
Most housing solutions focus on multifamily rental properties for older people at 80% of area median income. Instead, this breakthrough approach prioritizes Black youth – most at 30% AMI and below. It prepares youth for careers in the high-demand building trades and readies them to become first-generation homeowners as early as age 21. Build UP’s plans to scale include expanding to other cities and states and creating a first-time homebuyer mortgage program.
See How it Works
Preservation of Affordable Housing’s innovation draws on new insights into how trauma impacts the body and brain to create communities where economic mobility is the long-term goal and residents and staff can truly thrive.
Innovation Milestones
With support from the Breakthrough Challenge, Preservation of Affordable Housing engaged four teams of residents and frontline staff across diverse communities to co-design its Trauma-Informed Housing innovation using trauma-informed approaches to building design, resident services, property management, and human resources.
Teams drew on community-based research, collective brainstorming and creative prototyping to test new ideas for community change that address root causes, not surface symptoms.
Through collaborative co-design, Trauma-Informed Housing gives residents and frontline staff opportunities to reshape their communities to promote well-being and equity for everyone.
POAH’s partners on the innovation included Design Impact, MASS Design Group, Center for Trauma-Informed Innovation, Stewards of Affordable Housing for the Future, and Community Services League.
POAH’s learning is packaged into a playbook for other owners to adopt and adapt in their work.