The idealized image of the American Dream goes something like this: You work hard, raise a family, buy a home, send your children to college and live happily ever after. Over the past decade, Regional Housing Legal Services represented several nonprofit community development corporations (CDCs) developing affordable homeownership housing, enabling many low-income buyers to become successful homeowners.
Achieving this dream was made possible by city funding and by an innovative Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency initiative to fund affordable low-income and workforce developments, the Homeownership Choice Program. Prospective homebuyers attended workshops conducted by trained housing counselors to assure they had good credit and could afford to buy the affordable homes, so the mortgage default rate has been extremely low in these developments.
