By Adam Stewart
From the Newsroom
I had the opportunity to talk with Lacy Stauffacher on Monday about Interfaith Housing and Community Services’ Kansas Individual Development Account program that, among other uses, helps low-income individuals and families become homeowners.
That program has been on my radar for quite a while, going back to at least 2016, reporting on Hutchinson Housing Commission meetings. I never qualified for it since knowing of its existence—believe me, as someone who was saving up for a down payment for a house, I checked—but writing about it this week got me thinking about programs supporting homeownership more generally.
When I was ready to buy a house in 2020, I was able to use a couple of other programs. With funds from Federal Home Loan Bank-Topeka’s Homeownership Set Aside and the City of Hutchinson’s featured neighborhood down payment assistance, I was able to put down 20% and get a great interest rate while still keeping enough in my own savings to make some initial repairs and buy some new furniture. It really was a relief that I could take my busted old secondhand sofa out to the curb for disposal instead of having to pack it up and move it to the house.
That assistance also put me, and then us after I got married in the next year, that much closer to major projects in our century-old house. So far, those projects have included replacing two-thirds of the windows in the house and updating about half of the electrical. Just today, my wife and I were going over plans with an electrician for updating the other half of the electrical this fall. I estimate the down payment assistance I got moved all of those projects up about a year.
In September, I wrote about the Hutchinson Regional Medical Foundation and an anonymous donor partnering to offer $25,000 in down payment assistance to eight frontline healthcare workers, healthcare educators, and police. That’s quite a lot of assistance, but it’s specifically for new construction, so it is probably warranted. Combined with other local incentives and the Kansas IDA program, a homebuyer could turn $3,000 of savings into $39,000 toward a down payment.
These programs matter for a couple of reasons. For one, homeownership has been the clearest way for Americans to build wealth for most of the 20th and 21st centuries. This isn’t about housing speculation, like what contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, assuming that values will go up so much, so fast that a “bad mortgage” is impossible. This is about buying a home, gradually paying off the loan and fixing the house up, and having a valuable asset at the end. People need homes, and if you’re going to be paying for a home every month, buying lets you build equity that renting doesn’t provide.
Homeownership also matters because it supports stability, community, and investment. Buying a home is one of the biggest ways someone can “put down roots.” I know my neighbors now so much better than I did when I was renting, even though I was in my last apartment for longer than I have been in my house, and I think that’s natural. I plan to live on my block for years, and I expect a lot of my neighbors will as well. It makes sense to at least get to know them.
Homeownership also encourages investing time and money in your home. I already mentioned replacing windows and updating electrical. We have also repainted our house and garage (with an assist from Brush Up Hutch) and started working on landscaping. We wouldn’t have done all of that on a house we rented from somebody else, and most people wouldn’t.
Homeownership, especially in neighborhoods with older homes, helps preserve those homes for future generations. A housing needs assessment says Hutchinson and Reno County need a lot of new housing construction to meet future needs, but every house that is allowed to become uninhabitable through neglect is one more house that needs to be replaced. When the starting point for new, market-rate housing is $350,000, keeping older houses in good shape by helping make more homeowners is a good investment.
So support these kinds of programs, whether by donating, or telling decision makers that you support them, or even by utilizing the ones you qualify for—programs with strong demand are much less likely to face the chopping block than ones that routinely underspend their budget because people don’t use them enough.
Adam Stewart is the assistant news editor of The Hutchinson Tribune. He can be reached at adam@hutchtribune.com.