A blog post by Robbie Franklin, Director of Real Estate Development, Southside Community Development & Housing Corporation
What makes an idea in our affordable housing industry innovative? Is it the idea’s creativity, its novelty, its newness? Or is it instead the idea’s potential for impact, its scalability, its financial durability, and its responsiveness to local challenges? As grantors and funders in our affordable housing industry increasingly prioritize innovation in their funding strategies, I’ve grappled with how to define the term several times over, and how the work we do fits into it. The more I talk with innovation-focused funders, the more I learn that the solutions they are looking for to our housing affordability crisis are the ones that demonstrate high impact, scalability, financial feasibility, and local responsiveness. I would argue that the community development models that best fit this description already exist in the communities we serve, and we should nurture their success rather than searching for new solutions.
Let’s use homeownership as an example. We in the affordable housing industry understand that low- to moderate-income, first-time and first-generation, and BIPOC homebuyers all face similar barriers in our region to obtaining homeownership. These barriers largely consist of:
- Lack of supply of affordable housing,
- Financial barriers including credit challenges and/or lack of a significant down payment,
- Personal barriers including lack of knowledge and/or distrust in the homebuying process and banking industry; and,
- Structural barriers including the lack of diversity and language access within our regional housing industry.
Nonprofit housing professionals and industry leaders work every day to mitigate these barriers and create pathways to affordable homeownership, which over the past several decades have resulted in impactful programs that are fine-tuned to serve the local needs of our region.
Here at the Southside Community Development & Housing Corporation (SCDHC), our Pathways to Homeownership model combines new affordable housing development with one-on-one housing counseling services that provide homebuyer education, pre-purchase counseling, financial coaching, credit counseling, down payment assistance, and match savings programs. Our goal with our services is to assist any person who is interested in homeownership to become mortgage ready and overcome their individual barriers to homeownership, while building new homes that are affordable to them. We’ve tweaked and improved the program over the past 38 years, including obtaining our HUD-approved training and designation in 1998, increasing post-purchase and foreclosure prevention services in the late 2000s, offering fully English/Spanish bilingual services beginning in 2019, and hiring staff with lived experience and expertise in the field across the decades. The results of our program speak for themselves; we’ve helped over 12,000 households purchase their first home, built over 500 homes for homeownership, and helped over 2,000 households avoid foreclosure. We’ve expanded this model of community development to Petersburg and Emporia, continuously improving housing and financial outcomes for Black, Hispanic, and Female-led households, all on a shoestring budget.
Across the Richmond metro area, dozens more programs similarly designed to serve their clients’ needs with thousands of additional homebuyers and homes built provide the foundation for our region’s affordable housing ecosystem. Let us scale and invest in these programs and see what they are capable of at full capacity; they have already proven impactful and resilient.
For the month of June, our affordable housing industry is celebrating National Homeownership Month, intended to highlight the value of homeownership in our country and the importance of creating attainable homeownership opportunities for all who seek them. As we continue our work creating pathways to homeownership in our communities, let us consider the wants and needs of the homebuyers we serve, many of whom work at our own organizations. Young families, working professionals, single parents, and older adults are all looking for the same thing: a home they can afford, that they can grow into, that is in a neighborhood where they can work, live, and play. These needs are simple, and we have all the necessary tools in place to meet them; let’s invest in these proven solutions and see what is possible.
Robbie Franklin serves as the Director of Real Estate Development at the Southside Community Development & Housing Corporation, whose work was recently featured in VFN’s Housing Mini Series sponsored by Virginia Housing.