Moving to shared equity: locational outcomes for households in shared equity homeownership programs

Abstract

The impact of U.S. housing policy on household locational outcomes has primarily been studied in the context of rental housing assistance programs, but the impact of alternative homeownership models is less fully explored. In this study, we assess residential trajectories for households that have participated in shared-equity homeownership (SEH) programs such as Community Land Trusts and Limited Equity Housing Cooperatives. We examine changes in neighborhood characteristics that occur when households enter and exit SEH units, and compare those outcomes with similar households that entered traditional homeownership or continued to rent. We find that while entering SEH is associated with decreases in neighborhood opportunity measures, exiting SEH is associated with improvements in key measures including lower concentrations of poverty. We conclude that while entering SEH may entail moving to lower-opportunity neighborhoods, participation in SEH programs increases the long-term economic and socio-spatial mobility of participating households by enabling them to access a broader array of neighborhood contexts in their subsequent move.

Keywords:

• Shared-equity homeownership
• community land trusts
• locational outcomes
• residential mobility
• geographies of opportunity

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Seattle Foundation and West Coast Poverty Center for their financial support, as well as Grounded Solutions Network for providing data on shared-equity homeownership.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Dudley Neighbors, Inc., for example, was formed to combat high poverty, extreme disinvestment, land speculation, and a large number of underutilized land parcels in Boston’s Dudley and Roxbury neighborhoods (Meehan, 2014). Proud Ground was established in response to the affordable housing crisis and displacement from gentrification in the Portland area (Thaden & Lowe, 2014).

2 Given the variable size of census tracts, more records were retained in rural areas, where Zip Codes, towns, and Census-Designated Places are more likely to be coterminous with census tracts.

3 Due to organization-level variations in record-keeping, moves from certain areas are disproportionately likely to be excluded. Many moves within the Seattle area are excluded, for example, because they include street names but not house numbers. These records are included in cases where the street was located entirely within one census tract, but records naming a street crossing multiple census tracts are excluded.

4 Defined as metropolitan statistical area, or state for non-metropolitan observations.

5 Matching based on propensity scores instead of Mahalanobis distance yields similar outcomes both for matching balance and for model results.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NSF; National Institutes of Health.

Notes on contributors

Alex Ramiller

Alex Ramiller is a Ph.D. student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California Berkeley, researching the connections between residential mobility, property ownership, and property turnover. He received an MA in Geography from the University of Washington, and a BA in Geography and Economics from Macalester College.

Arthur Acolin

Arthur Acolin is an Assistant Professor and Bob Filley Endowed Chair in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. His research focuses on access to housing and developing new tools to support equitable and inclusive urban growth. He obtained a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Development from the University of Southern California, an M.Sc. in Urban Policy from the London School of Economics and Sciences Po Paris and an undergraduate degree in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

Rebecca J. Walter

Rebecca J. Walter is an Associate Professor and Windermere Endowed Chair in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on advancing national housing policy for low-income households.

Ruoniu Wang

Ruoniu (Vince) Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. He is a Research Fellow at Grounded Solutions Network, where he leads the effort of tracking the scope, trends, and impacts of inclusionary housing, community land trust, and other types of shared equity homeownership programs.