Housing for Neighbors: New Opportunities in Durham

In Durham, North Carolina's Old North Durham neighborhood, residents have begun to experiment with a "sweat-equity" form of low-cost housing development. Durham administrators have replaced the term "sweat-equity" with the less descriptive title: "owner-builder". For all practical purposes, the administrative process and housing goals of these self-help programs are equal. The Durham owner-builder program attempts to provide incentives and some direct assistance for rehabilitation of the community's deteriorating housing stock. Under the proposed program guidelines, owner-builders will develop eight new townhouses and rehabilitate an historic apartment building into condominiums. The rehabilitation project will be the first such Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) project in the United States. The program's primary service will be to reduce or eliminate down-payments for rehabilitation projects. Homeownership opportunities will be provided for households otherwise excluded from conventional housing finance markets. A secondary goal of the NHS is an improved state of security and stability within the neighborhood as a consequence of the owner-builders' direct attention to property improvement. In the following analysis, objectives of an NHS and the relationship between an NHS and an owner-builder program will be described