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A reflection and invitation from Daniele Berman, CHT Director of External Relations and Advocacy

I’ve worked for Community Home Trust now for four and a half years, and this fall will mark ten years since I purchased my own affordable home. But the program through which I bought my house uses a very different model from CHT, and in fact, one of the most important things I’ve learned about “affordable housing” over the past ten years is how broadly the term can be defined. It is used to describe everything from fully subsidized public housing to rentals to a variety of homeownership models, with a wide range of versions of “affordability” fitting the definition.

Maybe you have questions about what exactly “housing affordability” is, like I did. Who gets to define the term, and what does it mean that it encompasses a range of programs and requirements? When we talk about CHT’s work as being one tool in the affordable housing toolkit, how can we explain the specific need it meets and how it contributes to the broad work of making sure everyone has an affordable place to live?

Our new publication, “Shared Equity, Lasting Impact: Strategies for Affordable and Sustainable Housing,” explores those questions, from a high-level examination of what “housing affordability” means to a much more specific look at how CHT’s model tackles the challenge. It’s available as a free download here, and I can also drop a printed copy in the mail to you if you’d rather read it that way. Just shoot me an email at dberman@communityhometrust.org with your mailing address.

And don’t hesitate to reach out with questions! As our country’s housing crisis persists, it’s going to take all of us working together using a broad range of models to solve it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions.