Homeownership Opportunities Beyond Single-Family: Quantifying the Current Landscape

Although homeownership is commonly portrayed as a single household living in a detached residential structure, the landscape of homeownership in the United States offers a diverse array of homeownership opportunities beyond traditional single-family homes with a single or married-couple borrower(s), some of which provide more affordable entry points into homeownership for low- and moderate-income (LMI) households. This brief identifies and quantifies these homeownership types for the United States and Western U.S. states in the 12th Federal Reserve District.1 These homeownership types include condominiums (condos), housing cooperatives (co-ops), community land trusts (CLTs), tenancies in common (TICs), multiunit buildings with an onsite owner, homes with accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and homeowners sharing a unit with extended family or others. The brief develops a typology organizing these homeownership categories by whether they involve shared ownership, a shared property, or shared occupancy. The brief outlines and contextualizes each homeownership type and provides estimated unit counts for each geographic scale, where possible. It then discusses innovations in the community development field, as well as outstanding barriers to development and lending for new units in different homeownership categories. Finally, the brief outlines additional research and data collection needed to further clarify the accessibility and distribution of these homeownership types.