The presenter, a real estate investor and housing advocate, discovered that peers misunderstood their communities’ housing issues. This presentation illustrates how common housing terms can be barriers to garnering support for affordable housing.
Numerous challenges to building affordable housing include land-purchase competition, rising construction and development costs, a high regional cost of living, demand that exceeds supply, prohibitive policies and regulations, burdensome tax incentive applications, scarce partners, government regulations, and policies that preclude missing-middle housing options. Planners may or may not understand and fully appreciate these challenges.
The average small-business real estate investor (e.g. rehabber, wholesaler, or landlord) may only produce one product, such as a three-bedroom, two-bath, 1,800 square foot unit, to sell or rent. The presenter realized that the majority of such investors understand neither “affordable” housing nor the housing continuum – including “missing middle.”.
Participants discover how to find and partner with real estate developers who are interested in refocusing their traditional business model to include various types of missing-middle housing, learning about creating or maintaining affordable housing, and becoming affordable-housing advocates and community supporters.
NPC Peer Reviewers assigned this presentation a learning level of Intermediate. For more on learning-level descriptions, visit our General Information Page.
Learning Objectives:
Recognize that people don’t know a lot about housing and what you can do about it.
Use parallel industries to create solutions for developing affordable housing.
Explain the housing continuum and how real estate developers can get involved in the missing middle.
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