HOUSTON – Sunday marks seven years since Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas.
The slow-moving storm would cause significant impacts in the Houston area. The downpours lasted for days, dropping three feet of rain or more on large sections of Southeast Texas. 68 Texans lost their lives, more than half of the victims were in the Greater Houston area. It was the most significant tropical cyclone rainfall event ever recorded in the U.S.
About 300,000 homes and businesses were flooded across Southeast Texas. The Texas Division of Emergency Management estimates the total cost of damages at $125 billion, second only to Hurricane Katrina. The rebuilding process highlighted the need for affordable housing and jump-started the Houston Community Land Trust (HCLT). It’s a nonprofit that prevents residential land from becoming too expensive for the average homebuyer.
The Houston Community Land Trust was created in 2018. Its primary mission: creating permanent affordability.
“So a lot of times when we think about affordable programs such as down payment assistance for housing or affordable multi-family units, those are affordable for a short amount of time—five years, ten years, some even 30 years. But ultimately, we lose that affordability, and we have to keep reinvesting in the community. Land trust is an option for people who want that long-term permanent affordability, not just for them, but for future generations,” said HCLT’s Executive Director, Ashley Allen.
Allen says they’ve helped house about 200 families since they first got started.
“I think we need to really be clear about what affordable housing is because it goes based on the federal guidelines. We can talk about people with zero income. We can talk about people with fixed income. And then we could talk about people who are making almost six figures all the way up to 120% of the area median income. When we’re talking about the range of affordable, quote-unquote, affordable housing. So I think it’s a matter of finding a program and seeing what the eligibility requirements are; our eligibility requirements are on our website,” Allen said.
Allen says owning one of their homes is not much different than owning, say, a condo.
“You own the house, you have the rights to the house, you have the rights to the land, you can pass it on to your heirs. The only difference is we restrict the resale price so that another family can benefit from what you benefit from. Most of our homeowners are not coming to the table with zero dollars. They don’t have to put anything in outside of their earnest money and the mortgage that they’re taking out. The average mortgage for a homeowner right now is $106,000. So again, we’re talking about very little investment on the front, as far as out of pocket. And then your mortgages are reasonable,” she said.
Despite being at the forefront of housing innovation and a model for other cities, HCLT has seen a change in their funding.
“We started with one program, and that program resulted in about a $3 million investment into the Community Land Trust. And then we started a pilot program called Home Buyer Choice, where home buyers were able to get up to $150,000 to purchase a home throughout the city and in different communities such as Humble and Kingwood. That program was another $3 million. Because of the success of that program and how rapidly we were able to spend that $3 million, we did get an allocation of TIRZ dollars for $52.6 million. But unfortunately, due to some political changes and different changes in leadership within the housing department, that funding was reduced to about $28 million,” she said.
The reduction in funding hasn’t slowed them down though. HCLT is helping folks after Beryl.
“So being able to help them understand how to process an insurance claim, making sure that they were taking proper pictures before calling an insurance adjuster to come out to their home, making sure that contractors they were using were licensed, bonded, and insured, and that they were getting quality work and not being taken advantage of. Protecting their asset also included tree removal,” she said.