January News from AHW & Beyond

We've emerged from the 10 darkest weeks of the year and while we're a few days off from Punxatawney Phil's proclamation, we're poking our heads out to share some of what we've been up to!

Manufactured Housing Communities: While AHW unfortunately wasn't funded in this round of Leahy Institute grants for rural partnerships, the program was featured on VPR along with a tour of one of AHW's manufactured housing communities to illustrate how a partnership might help the park become more resilient to climate change.

Shared Equity Homeownership: while it's been increasingly difficult to find homes beneath or even near our purchase price limit of approximately $300,000, downpayment assistance remains an important tool for increasing homeownership, especially among househoulds with no generational wealth, according to a recent Urban Institute report. According to the report, "Between September 2010 and September 2023, home prices rose 114 percent, while the consumer price index rose about 41 percent and wages rose 50 percent. In 2010, $10,400 would have covered a 5 percent down payment on the median home purchase, whereas now, a borrower would need $22,240 for the same 5 percent down payment." You can learn more about AHW's shared equity downpayment grant program here.

Housing Development: Having completed and fully leased Firehouse Apartments in Bristol, AHW is continuing to look for opportunities to develop new affordable housing for Addison County, in a very resource constrained market with few buildable sites available for development. Meanwhile, another Urban Institute report clearly points the finger at a lack of supply as the primary culprit responsible for our current housing crisis.

Finally, AHW was thrilled to be awarded a $775,000 grant from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board to support a new shared equity housing development in Middlebury! From the press release:

The Board committed $775,000 to allow Addison Housing Works (AHW) to provide down-payment assistance on six new construction single-family homes that are part of a real estate development project in Middlebury. Summit Development LLC (Summit), a private developer, is in the early phases of building more than 200 housing units in Middlebury, which will include both rental and homeownership. Summit plans to set aside six of the homeownership units for shared-equity buyers, who will receive down-payment assistance through AHW in exchange for limited equity upon resale.