A one-bedroom apartment on Park Street in Lynn is advertised for $1,350 a month. A downtown two-bedroom rents for $2,300. Even someone with rudimentary mathematics skills understands how high rents are an almost-insurmountable barrier to anyone interested in going from tenant to homeowner.
Saving money to buy a home, especially in the wake of the borrower protection laws erected following the 2008 housing crash, is tough to do if rent gobbles up most of a paycheck, leaving little, if any, money for savings.
Renters who cannot become homeowners are people who cannot obtain that single biggest source of equity in the United States: A home. Without equity, financing a higher education — still a primary pathway to a better income — becomes dependent on savings and borrowing.
Providing tenants with a path to ownership has been a challenge housing policy experts and elected officials have tried to forge with mixed success. Lynn Housing Authority and Neighborhood Development (LHAND) has helped public housing tenants learn money management basics and, in the process, draw their own map to self sufficiency and homeownership.
Gov. Baker, like governors before him, is unveiling affordable housing legislation and his aides are rallying state legislators to support a five-year $1.3 billion housing bond bill. The bill provides “capital authorization” or permission for money to be spent on a variety of housing initiatives, including new construction, public housing maintenance and extending, according to the State House News Service, a state tax credit that finances affordable housing development.
Baker administration housing officials say they have been successful in ensuring affordable housing is available to residents.
But public housing and subsidized housing are ultimately only crutches for people who have no other housing options. As LHAND officials are amply aware, the only way to help people throw away the crutch is to teach them to walk by giving them the self sufficiency income tools they need to become private housing market tenants and, eventually, homeowners.
The path leading to self sufficiency is rocky and overgrown, but state policies can help smooth it out. Affordable housing standards and thresholds already spelled out in state law need to be uniformly enforced. Public-private housing development partnerships can map out ways to provide subsidized apartments in a project and set up savings accounts tenants can contribute to in order to become market-rate tenants and, ultimately, homeowners.
Lending institutions and elected officials need to start or broaden conversations on how Americans tackle those two gigantic life expenses: Buying a home and paying for college. The conversation should be a wide one that does not rule out the notion of public-private “super loans” designed to get people into homes and help families build home equity to help pay for college.
The house and white picket fence almost disappeared from the American Dream nine years ago. But homeownership can be a means to an end and an end to a means.