Access to Affordable Housing August 2023

Habitat for Humanity International (Habitat International), founded in 1976, is a housing-focused ecumenical Christian organization that focuses on home construction and rehabilitation. In the United States, local and independent affiliates do much of Habitat’s day-to-day work; volunteer-built housing projects are the most well-known Habitat activity. In 2019, Habitat launched Cost of Home, a five-year advocacy campaign centered around influencing policy creation and implementation with the goal of supporting access to affordable homes for 10 million people. The campaign was designed both to promote the introduction and passage of affordable housing policies and to assist affiliates in their local work.

This assessment examines eight local and state policies related to housing that Habitat affiliates were involved in through advocacy and other efforts. This report explores each policy’s theory of change and examines how available evidence may or may not support the expectations for policy impact. It also provides the measurement or estimation of outcomes based on publicly available data. The studied policies were selected from an initial pool of 64 enacted policies across the Cost of Home campaign’s four general areas of focus: (1) increasing supply and preservation of affordable homes, (2) equitably increasing access to credit, (3) optimizing land use for affordable homes, and (4) ensuring access to and development of communities of opportunity.

This assessment considers the initial impact of concrete policies supported by the campaign, not the implementation of the campaign itself. For each of the policies, the Urban team interviewed local affiliates and other stakeholders, reviewed policy documentation, constructed theories of change, and analyzed administrative and secondary data to assess the impact.

The eight policies across the campaign’s four major policy areas are as follows:
Increasing supply and preservation of affordable homes
1. The Affordable Housing Bond in Raleigh, North Carolina, has been effective in supporting a range of affordable housing projects in the city by providing a substantial funding resource for affordable housing development and homeowner support. The components addressing homeownership and home repair and the designs to promote transit-oriented development are just starting to get underway.

2. The expansion of the Virginia Housing Trust Fund in 2021 injected a significant amount of additional funding into the Commonwealth’s Trust Fund to promote affordable housing and efforts to reduce homelessness. Initial patterns indicate that it has been effective in expanding the scope and geography of projects supported in the state.
3. The new Summit County Affordable Housing Trust Fund in Ohio, while just beginning, has supported housing development and preservation projects, which has been useful in expanding the local affordable-housing funding ecosystem and supporting nonprofit housing developers, particularly in scattered-site small-scale projects that previously lacked clear financing pathways.

Equitably increasing access to credit:
4. The Home Purchase Assistance Program in Washington, DC, increased the maximum down payment assistance amount for fiscal year 2023. We find that the program is an important tool for expanding homeownership opportunities to low- and moderate-income households in DC. However, while detailed program data is not fully available, the increase in the maximum assistance amount will likely have a limited impact on the program’s implementation and outcomes, given past trends.

5. The Rent Reporting for Credit Pilot Program in Colorado, which helps renters build credit through reporting timely rent payments to consumer reporting agencies, was able to enroll 282 tenants to participate, spread across 28 properties managed by six different landlords. Preliminary reports from the state point to an increase of 67 points in the average FICO credit score of participants after a year of pilot implementation. Our estimates suggest that a policy of this kind at the state level could increase credit scores for almost 9,000 people, start credit histories for over 1,000 people, and move up thousands of Coloradans to better credit score tiers.