LEAP Housing works to make homeownership possible when many are being priced out of market

“How much was your first house,” a young man asks an elderly woman in an aisle of a building supply store.

“My first house was $16,000,” she responds in the video posted to Instagram.

In an era where not only is home availability scarcer but home prices are outpacing income levels, one agency is doing something to help lower-income households still realize their dreams of homeownership.

On March 29, 2024, LEAP Housing celebrated Leap Day with the key handoff to its latest success story. Vanessa Ferrer and her son, Luca, took ownership of their home, in Caritas Commons, that they were able to purchase because of LEAP’s program.

Caritas Commons is made up of 14 homes on a land trust in Boise, and was the first in a series of properties that LEAP is turning into affordable communities for aspiring home buyers.

Ferrer had almost given up trying to find a home in the Treasure Valley, going so far as to research home availability and affordability in Nashville, Tennessee, last fall. She has lived in the area for six years and worked multiple jobs. At one point, she rented a 120-square-foot basement to live in, just to save money, and she gave herself a deadline of this May to find a place to buy.

Then she found out about the LEAP program through her hairdresser, who is also looking into going through the program.

“I couldn’t have done this without LEAP Housing and the City of Boise,” Ferrer said. “It’s been a wonderful opportunity. It’s important to have these programs just to get things going for the economy, for everybody.”

LEAP Housing is able to keep homeownership affordable by setting up trusts through land sales or donations and removing the cost of the land from the price of the home. Those trusts have leases for 99 or more years. When original buyers decide to sell the home, LEAP uses a concept called shared equity so that the buyer and seller have equitable outcomes.

Caritas Commons was built in two phases, and Ferrer purchased the first house sold on the trust from its original buyer. The house is 986 square feet, has four bedrooms, one bathroom, a full-size kitchen, a small yard and sold to Ferrer at $287,500. The median home price in Idaho ranges from $430,000 to $460,000 for a home with three bedrooms and two bathrooms at around 1,600 square feet. Some homes in the Treasure Valley that are barely 300,000 square feet bigger than Ferrer’s home are listed at around $650,000.

In the second quarter of 2023, Moody’s Analytics ranked Idaho at the bottom of the 50 states and Washington DC for affordability, calling the local housing market “overvalued.”

In a study by Pew Research, 49% of Americans in October of 2021 said availability of affordable housing in local communities was a problem. That was up 10% from 2018. The same survey revealed that 70% of Americans believe young adults have a harder time buying a home than their parents did.

Pew Research reported that the median sale price for a single-family home in the U.S. jumped 25% from $327,100 in the fourth quarter of 2019 ― the last full quarter unaffected by the global pandemic ― to $408,100 in the fourth quarter of 2021.

LEAP has a goal of providing 1,000 affordable homes by 2026 and is working hard to reach that goal, having just finished a second community, Whitney Commons, which is 11 homes at another site in Boise.
“The idea is that the first homeowner is income qualified and, when they move, they sell to another [home buyer] that is income qualified, and it ensures that it stays affordable forever,” said Bart Cochran, founder and chief executive officer of LEAP Housing. “The idea, to our knowledge, is the only strategy of affordable housing that creates perpetually affordable housing. … It’s a wealth-building strategy through equity, but it also creates a pretty critical key housing stability strategy as well.”

Ferrer’s purchase marks the first time LEAP has ever put its strategy of selling and buying from income qualified clients to and from each other.

“When a house goes up for sale that’s in the land trust, we have to do a calculation of what the sale price is and to ensure that it stays affordable,” Cochran said. “That whole process is quite intense. This was the first time we’ve done it, so we all worked together to make that happen.”

Along with Caritas and Whitney Commons, Cochran said other trusts are being worked on in Nampa, Mountain Home and Orofino. Though LEAP has a goal of 1,000 affordable units by 2026, it’s nowhere near what’s needed statewide.

“The numbers from the National Low Income Housing Coalition is 25,000 for what’s needed across the state,” he said. “A thousand seems like a lot of casting but it’s a drop in the bucket.”

As for Ferrer, she’s already making plans for her new home.

“I’m excited. My first thing is going to be an island project,” she said while standing in kitchen. “I’m going to make a little island here, but I’m going to build it myself. And then the gardening. I’ve never had a garden either.”