Economic Justice

I wonder if they have accessible models????

https://goo.gl/GNijFw

Through a rent-to-own program, residents will pay $1 per square foot in rent each month. For a 250-square-foot house, for example, rent is $250, when a similar home in Detroit might normally cost twice as much. After a maximum of seven years, the house can be fully paid off.

“Poor people lack an asset,” says Faith Fowler, a pastor and the executive director of Cass Community Social Services, the local nonprofit that created the program. “They don’t have anything that they could use as collateral, they don’t have anything they can sell to climb the economic ladder, if you will. They don’t have anything to leave their children. We saw this as the start for poor people–people making as little as $10,000 a year can end up owning a home in seven years.”

In some other programs, such as homes built by Habitat for Humanity, residents are required to have a mortgage. “People making that small amount of money can’t qualify for a mortgage,” she says. “So they’re essentially locked out of housing that serves as a piggyback for the rest of us. In addition to the pride of having a place you can call your own, the beginning of wealth, or the security of having an asset you can call your own, was very important to us. More important than the tininess of the home.”