Homeownership is increasingly out of reach for many Americans; home prices are rising and supply is decreasing. Programs such as down payment assistance, special purpose credit programs, and grant funding for first-time homebuyers or homebuyers of color are important, but without a pipeline of affordable homes, these programs can go only so far toward improving the homeownership outlook. In fall 2021, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced that half of the defaulted single-family loans that it sells would be held for nonprofits and state and local governments. Our case study focuses on the Community Aggregators Group (CAG), a coalition of nonprofits that came together following HUD’s announcement to pool funds and acquire assets that they then sold to local nonprofit affiliates for them to sell at an affordable price to homebuyers—or in some cases, sold directly to homebuyers. We focus on how this group came to collaborate and the implementation of its work. We discuss challenges, successes, next steps, and the policy outlook going forward.
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