Affordable Home Ownership and Land Trust

Affordable Home Ownership and Land Trust

Coordinator: Paul Spencer

Speakers: Nils Peterson, Executive Director of Moscow Affordable Housing Trust, Inc

Program Description: Creating Permanently Affordable Home Ownership with a Community Land Trust presentation and discussion via a Zoom Meeting on Tuesday, April 16, Noon to 1:00 pm.

Nils Peterson is celebrating his 10th year as the executive director of the Moscow Affordable Housing Trust, a position he took after retiring from Washington State University. He provided some insights into why access to affordable ownership is important to Pullman, how a Land Trust can help, and answer questions.

In a detailed explanation of the economics of house purchase economics in Pullman and Moscow, Nils showed that people with reasonably well paying jobs simply cannot afford to purchase a house. This is important because the greatest factor in wealth generation for most families is buying a house. Families who only rent do not get the saving and housing value increase advantages of owning a house and property.

Locally, the cost of a lot is a large fraction of the cost of building a house – $50,000 to $100,000. The Moscow Affordable Housing Trust has started a program to separate the cost of the land from the house itself using a land trust, so that the house buyer owns only the house. The Land Trust uses funds obtained through grants, donations, and local government and community support to start the process by buying land suitable for building houses.

When a family sells such a house, the family does not get to keep the full increase in the house’s value in order to make sure that the house will remain affordable for the next buyer.

The Moscow Affordable Housing Trust now has 4 such houses in their portfolio, and 5 in construction. The houses are usually small but are built to have low energy costs and maintenance costs. The Trust is cooperating with Habitat for Humanity to have 1 or more Habitat houses built on Trust Land.

The link for the Trust website is: https://www.moscowhousingtrust.org/

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