Brendi Bluitt didn’t think she fit the typical profile of someone needing public assistance to pay for housing. She had a good job in public relations, earning $80,000 a year.
But she qualified for D.C.’s home-purchase-assistance program, and she ended up getting an interest-free loan of more than $84,000. She had to contribute only $1,000 from her savings to buy her $376,000 condo.
“People maybe would think of someone else who maybe doesn’t look like me or isn’t in the same career field as me” receiving assistance, said Bluitt, who is also an advisory neighborhood commissioner in her Petworth neighborhood. “Honestly, without the program, it probably would have been a very long time before I was able to plant roots and purchase a home here.”
Across the country, as housing and other costs continue to outpace income increases, many middle-class home buyers like Bluitt are finding they can’t easily scrape together a down payment on their own. That has prompted city, state and nonprofit programs to expand eligibility for down-payment support — with some areas offering loans to people making more than $200,000.
Down Payment Resource, a company that compiles information on more than 2,700 home-buying programs, shared data with The Washington Post that showed more than 115 programs have raised their income threshold requirements since 2023. In most of those cases, the programs now offer aid to would-be home buyers whose income is above their local median, sometimes well above.
Memphis, for instance, now offers down-payment assistance to households with twice the local median income that purchase in designated areas of the city. San Francisco offers loans of up to half a million dollars for first-time home buyers; a single person with income up to $218,200 can apply.
“The affordability crisis is climbing up the income ladder,” said Rob Chrane, Down Payment Resource’s chief executive. “Today, even if you have a six-figure income in your household, it’s not easy to save money for a down payment for a home because costs everywhere are going up.”
The median U.S. home price now tops $405,000. The Urban Institute found that home sales prices have risen 80 percent since 2017, while wages have grown 38 percent.
Adam Grubbs, who runs a municipal down-payment-assistance program in Aurora, Illinois, said local leaders there decided to use municipal funds (about $300,000) to give middle-income households support similar to a federally subsidized program for low-income buyers.
“It’s those police officers, your fire department staff, nurses, teachers: those people that, they do have good jobs, but with this housing market it’s still unaffordable for them. Even they need help trying to buy their first house,” Grubbs said.
His city is offering interest-free loans of $20,000 to people earning up to 120 percent of the area median income (AMI) — up to $100,000 for a single person or $143,880 for a family of four.
Grubbs will evaluate each application, rejecting those with sufficient savings and those who wouldn’t be able to make their mortgage payments even with up-front help.
Some experts say more widely available down-payment assistance doesn’t make sense as a fix for a widespread price problem. It doesn’t make monthly mortgage payments more affordable. And offering buyers more money to compete for scarce houses only raises the number of competitors, when what’s needed is more supply of houses, not more buyers.
There are still far more programs helping people below 80 percent of the area median income than above-median households, in part because federal Housing and Urban Development grants are restricted to recipients below 80 percent. Overall, the average eligibility threshold across the 2,700 programs in Down Payment Resource’s database is just below 100 percent.
Gregory Hettrick, vice president at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas, said his bank has kept eligibility at 80 percent for its major down-payment-assistance program, while raising the threshold to 165 percent for a much smaller program specifically for disabled veterans. Some other banks in his network have created new programs over the past three years meant to serve home buyers above 80 percent. “There’s plenty of demand for supporting home buyers under 80 percent AMI,” Hettrick said. “We always have more demand … than we can support.”
The D.C. program that Bluitt used, which offers interest-free loans as large as $202,000, is open to city residents making up to 110 percent of the median income. Another program, D.C. Open Doors, has expanded its eligibility to buyers earning up to 170 percent of the median income, with a maximum income threshold of $216,580.
Income isn’t the only eligibility factor. The city does an intensive review of an applicant’s finances and the home they want to buy. Julienne Joseph, a senior vice president of the D.C. Housing Finance Agency, said that an early-career adult who has a fairly high income but no family help saving for a down payment, looking at a modest home, is likely to get their funding. Someone buying a multimillion-dollar house with gifts from their parents won’t.
“We recently made that adjustment as we saw affordability become an issue even more,” Joseph said. “You would think that 110 percent AMI is raking in the dough. But if you’ve got five people who are living off of that, it’s really difficult.”
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