Multifamily Homeownership: Part 2
An exciting report from the SF Federal Reserve is an opportunity to keep growing this vital housing space
With everything happening in Washington, it can be hard to keep focus on the things we know are important. Where We Go From Here will not stick our head in the sand, nor will we let the noise drown out actual work and real ideas that push us towards a better housing system. I hope you feel we get the mix right. If you missed it, check out my thoughts on housing in the current moment.
Disclaimer: The views in this post are the opinions of the author only, not that of the SF FED.
Back in 2023, I highlighted an exciting report entitled Multifamily Homeownership: Pathways to Addressing the California Housing Crisis. Written with our client and partners California Community Builders, the report is the first of its kind to try to draw together all the different ways in which people own homes together.
Condominiums, Community Land Trusts (CLTs), Co-ops and Tenancies-in-Common (TICs) are well known ways of owning multifamily structures together, but you rarely read about them together. Informal multigenerational housing, which often involves shared ownership under a single roof, is also something people know about, but rarely consider as part of the same spectrum as condos and co-ops and more formal ways of doing shared ownership.
In that report, we managed to pull together some very basic numbers on condominium ownership, but it was beyond our scope to really get into the data to show the size and scope of these important housing tenures. As some of you have already seen on LinkedIn, I’ve been fortunate to be part of the next iteration of this research, this time with the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank.
Now, finally, we have some numbers.
The Brief (In Brief)
The brief, Homeownership Opportunities Beyond Single-Family: Quantifying the Current Landscape, goes one step deeper and estimates the size and shape of the multifamily homeownership space. We dig into some of the data available on the more than 6 million owner-occupied multifamily units, most of which are condominiums, but with a growing presence of TICs, CLTs and other forms. We experiment with ways of seeing these informal multifamily homeownership arrangements in the data, and look at complexes - usually 2-4 units - where an owner lives onsite and where you may have owners and renters together. Focused on the 12th Federal District Reserve - basically the Western States and Pacifica/Hawaii - it does include some basic information for the country as a whole.
Why This Report is Important
We need to nudge policymakers to take housing opportunity more seriously
It is the first publication I have seen from a public agency on this topic. I’ve presented the CCB work to some of the folks in Washington who need to take this critical housing opportunity more seriously, and I am hoping that by having some numbers and details about these tenures in a public document like this, it will help nudge them into their own explorations of how multifamily homeownership can be supported. Thanks to the brilliance of Alex Ramiller, we were able to push the data as far as it could go - and hopefully make the case for better data on subtenures.
When combined with the CCB report, I hope it provides housers with a solid foundation to take this more comprehensive and equitable approach to homeownership. There is much to do - everything from construction defect litigation reform to changes in how Fannie and Freddie see these tenures to changes in how housing counselors and realtors and lenders approach these types of homeownership. We have to make it easier to build, buy, sell, find, manage and maintain these tenures if we want them to thrive.
Is your organization interested in multifamily homeownership? Reach out and see if Schafran Strategies can help you push this work forward
We need to build a broader homeownership coalition centered on diverse ways of owning
But most importantly, I hope this report can continue the work we started with CCB to build a broader homeownership coalition centered on diverse ways of owning. The reason why you tend to read about condos in one place and CLTs in another is that they tend to fall on different sides of the market-rate / deed-restricted affordable divide (more on this to come), and have different advocates and interest groups. While it may seem that this is too large of a political gap to bridge, I don’t think it is, and I know there are Housing leaders in California capable of doing it.
Individual ownership, intergenerational ownership, affordable ownership, community ownership are all more connected than we sometimes believe, and I am certain that only by connecting these issues politically, and embracing this diverse vision of homeownership as a strategy, do we have a real chance to make change in our housing system. Us housers need to figure out how to bridge this political gap. It’s not just our current moment that demands it - this diverse approach to homeownership has long been the missing piece of American housing politics. What’s happening right now only makes it more urgent.