Prime real estate! Families earning less than 80% of median income in Nashville, Seattle and Arlington can get a below-market home in Amazon’s new $40M affordable housing scheme

Amazon is launching a new $40 million affordable housing initiative aimed at expanding homeownership for middle-income families in three cities where it has major operations.

The program aims to help approximately 800 families purchase below-market homes with minimal down payments in the areas surrounding Seattle, Nashville, Tennessee and Arlington, Virginia.

The pilot initiative, a partnership with the National Housing Trust, targets households earning less than 80 percent of the local median income, which for a family of four would be $80,000 in Nashville, $95,000 in Arlington and $100,900 in Seattle.

The program is part of a larger $2 billion pledge by Amazon to create or preserve at least 20,000 affordable homes near its hubs — after the company and other tech giants were accused of driving up home prices with their legions of well-paid employees.

Details of the new initiative, which will be managed through local partner organizations in each of the three cities, are still evolving, but NHT says it plans to test concepts including shared share ownership to keep house prices low.

Shared equity ownership involves a one-time investment that subsidizes the cost of the home and then places limits on its resale value to keep it affordable for the next family who buys it.

In some cases it takes the form of a community trust that owns and maintains the land on which the house stands, with the residents owning the physical house itself.

Amazon says removing the cost of land from the overall cost of the home will keep the price of homes affordable for middle-class homeowners.

“Historically, those who are able to own a home are more likely to experience long-term economic stability, while those who cannot are more likely to experience financial hardship,” said Senthil Sankaran, director of the Amazon Housing Equity Fund.

“This new initiative will allow us to explore ways to help middle-income residents realize their dreams of homeownership and in turn help build wealth that can be passed on to the next generation,” Sankaran added.

Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, which has long struggled with a shortage of affordable housing, and is building its second headquarters in Arlington, on the outskirts of Washington DC.

The company also runs its logistics operations from Nashville, where it has more than 2,500 employees, and plans to hire up to 5,000.

Amazon has more than 65,000 employees in the Seattle area and about 8,000 in Arlington, where it expects to grow its workforce to about 25,000 by 2030.

In June, Amazon opened phase one of Headquarters 2, although it has indefinitely halted construction on the second phase of the project.

The new affordable housing initiative is not intended to help Amazon workers, but rather teachers, first responders and service industry workers who are at risk of having to forego their homes as the retail giant’s corporate campuses grow.

Amazon is attracting thousands of well-paid workers to each of the areas where it opens a business base. Typically, they drive up housing prices and begin to gentrify poorer areas, whose longtime residents find themselves no longer able to live where they grew up.

In Nashville, residents who qualify for the program can purchase a home below market price with as little as a 1 percent down payment. The Tennessean.

Amazon is partnering with The Housing Fund to administer the program in Nashville, where families making up 120 percent of the median income can qualify — a threshold of about $120,000 for a family of four.

“Incomes are not keeping pace with home prices, so people could lose their homes due to rising property taxes,” Housing Fund CEO Marshall Crawford told the newspaper, adding that the city is facing a shortage of affordable housing.

“Now Amazon is giving us additional resources to acquire properties. It was a big win for them to build a headquarters in Nashville and it’s a big win for residents to put money into affordable housing.”

In Nashville, the median home sales price is $459,900, up 3.3 percent from a year ago and up 12.1 percent from December 2019, according to Redfin data.

The median home price of $687,500 in Arlington represents a rapid increase, up 7.4 percent from a year ago and a gain of 15.7 percent from December 2019.

In Seattle, the median home sales price remains sky-high at $810,000, though that’s down 4.5 percent from a year ago and down 2 percent from December 2019.

NHT says each local partner will have its own homebuyer selection process with specific criteria based on income, although the aim of the program is for the majority of homes to go to families earning 80 percent or less of the average local income.

Local partners in the Seattle area include Habitat for Humanity Seattle-King & Kittitas Counties, which will provide flexible financing to support the construction of more than 140 homes, as well as financing that will enable 50 families to become homeowners by 2023.

The Habitat projects include cottages in South Park, apartments in Capitol Hill and Columbia City and townhomes in Burien, CEO Brett D’Antonio told the newspaper. Seattle Times.

Habitat homes are available to households earning 80 percent of the county median income or less, which in King County is 100,900 for a family of four..

Other partners in the Seattle area include African Community Housing & Development and the Homestead Community Land Trust.

In the DC area, Amazon is partnering with Douglass Community Land Trust, which will use the funds to increase their development capacity for their home equity programs.

Some of the funds will support the group’s “Pay It Forward” program, in which the trust buys homes and then resells them at below-market prices to low- and middle-income households, the group said. WashingtonPost.

However, when these homeowners ultimately resell, they must also do so below market price.

That program is open to first-time homebuyers who earn less than 80 percent of the area median income, which in the D.C. region would be $95,300 for a family of four.