Builder Magazine, 2007
By Pat Curry
I was really supposed to be researching other things at the library tonight, but I got sucked into this beautiful story of idealistic landowning farmers, feisty developers and lots of help from the community. Affordable housing shouldn’t automatically be ugly or less stylish—there’s so much you can do with what you have.
Homes and communities are not like start-ups—I feel there has to be a balancing act so that more cool places like Green Cay Village.
Too many rules would destroy lots of creativity and innovation as well as standard of living, but too few would create a place where someone has to be either really lucky or risk their business to do the right thing.
Green Cay Village works with four preferred lenders, says sales manager Daniel Travis, to help buyers learn about special loan programs that might be available to them. The lenders are trained and certified by the county and state to locate and access state and local grants for down-payment assistance, first-time home buyer programs, a state bond program for affordable housing, and special mortgages for teachers, healthcare professionals, police, and firefighters.
To make sure that the homes would go to working families, Goray put anti-investor restrictions into the sales contract. Unless the buyer has extenuating circumstances, such as a job transfer, the unit can’t be rented out for two years. If it’s sold within a year, 100 percent of the profit goes back to the developer. In the second year, 50 percent of the profit goes back to the developer. After that point, any profits from a sale will be retained by the owner. “Everybody thought we were crazy because the government didn’t make us [restrict investors] and it was not a condition of the sale of the land,” Goray says. “We thought it was the right thing to do.” It proved to be an incredibly valuable policy when the market turned and investors everywhere started dumping properties and walking away from deposits.
“If we sold to investors, we’d be sitting here with 60 percent cancellations, trying to sell in a soft market,” Goray says. “I think we have 5 percent or 6 percent cancellations, due mostly to job transfers. It’s kind of a fun story.”
I think it’s great to have a home and it is part of the American Dream, but considering the cost of mortgages and that skyrocketing home prices are unsustainable, maybe we can modify that dream and make it OK to live in affordable or low-income housing too.
Maybe not everyone was meant to play the stock market in the United States. Maybe a lot of people are doing great things for society by being schoolteachers or low-paid baseball coaches, right?
