Bank of America Community Development Banking announced that it will invest up to $150 million in equity to preserve more than 3,000 affordable housing units for middle-income households in partnership with Enterprise Community Partners.
The new effort aims to help Americans earning between 80% and 120% of the area median income remain in housing they can afford.
“As rent costs outpace income growth, the continued lack of affordable housing inventory is forcing families to make difficult decisions on how and where they live,” said Maria Barry, Bank of America Community Development Banking national executive. “This fund will focus on the ‘missing middle,’ which refers to middle-income individuals who make too much money to qualify for subsidized housing but make too little to afford market-rate housing in their community.”
Officials noted that the investment comes at a time when home prices and apartment rents continue to rise. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University’s 2022 State of the Nation’s Housing report, home prices rose 20.6% from March 2021 to March 2022 and rents jumped 12%.
Both Enterprise and Bank of America plan to leverage their national networks and resources to help accelerate the preservation of affordable housing.
“Preserving affordable housing for middle-income households is more critical today than ever as our country faces the worst housing shortage in generations,” said Lori Chatman, interim co-CEO of Enterprise. “Through our work with Bank of America, we are able to fill a gap to creatively finance projects that will preserve the supply of affordable homes and build resilience and upward mobility for thousands of families.”
This fund builds on Bank of America and Enterprise’s partnership spanning more than 30 years to create and preserve thousands of affordable homes. It will expand the partnership to preserve middle-income homes by investing critical equity capital to allow affordable housing providers to acquire existing properties that are at risk of being converted into unaffordable, market-rate homes and preserve their affordability for the long term.
