Rosa Village Secures State Funding!

Our Rosa Village Co-op was recently awarded state funding from Oregon Housing & Community Services (OHCS), providing the remaining financing needed to construct 52 more permanently affordable, cooperatively owned homes in Eugene!

We are sincerely grateful to the Homeownership Division staff at OHCS for taking the time to make thoughtful changes to their LIFT Homeownership and Oregon Affordable Housing Tax Credit (OAHTC) programs in order to make this possible.

As the first multi-family housing co-op to be funded under the LIFT and OAHTC programs, Rosa Village Co-op will provide a replicable, statewide financing model for expanding the affordable homeownership continuum in Oregon to reach households that may face barriers to qualifying for a mortgage as an individual household.

This marks a major milestone that we have been working towards for several years!

The Backstory to How We Got Here

Our first three co-op developments in Lane County were small in size (6 to 22 homes each) and relied almost entirely on fundraising and in-kind contributions to make them happen. While this grassroots approach was compelling, we knew a different approach would be necessary to build at a larger scale. So beginning in 2021, with our 70 unit Peace Village Co-op development in front of us, we began to look into state funding and incentive programs through Oregon Housing & Community Services.

However, we soon learned that cooperative housing—which falls somewhere between multi-family rental and single-family homeownership— was not compatible with any of the existing state programs. Representatives in the state legislature recognized the value of the limited-equity co-op model that we were advocating for, and helped to change this.

In 2021, the late Rep. Gary Lief helped SquareOne secure $2m for a limited-equity co-op pilot program administered through OHCS, and in 2022 Sen. James Manning helped SquareOne secure another $3.3m direct allocation. This, along with other one-time funding through the COVID-era American Rescue Plan Act, allowed us to break ground on Peace Village Co-op towards the end of 2022. And in 2023, we worked with Rep. Nancy Nathanson to amend existing affordable rental housing incentives to be inclusive of limited-equity co-ops. This included:

• The Low-Income Rental Housing Property Tax Exemption, which allows developments serving households under 60% area median income to receive a full property tax exemption.

• The Oregon Affordable Housing Tax Credit program, which allows developments serving households under 80% area median income to reduce their mortgage interest rate by 4 percent.

This was all excellent progress, but there was still no ongoing program that could provide the level of subsidy needed to develop permanently affordable housing coo-ps on a regular basis. Peace Village was able to be completed thanks to unique, one-time COVID-era funding, and we needed to find a replacement for that if we wanted to be able to replicate the model.

The Oregon Local Innovation and Fast Track (LIFT) program, which uses state bonds to finance 0% interest forgivable loans, is the largest source of state funding for subsidizing affordable housing development. It's divided into two tracks: rental and homeownership. LIFT Rental restricts residents from holding a membership stake in the property, so our co-op ownership model was directed to LIFT Homeownership. However, on the Homeownership side, the amount of subsidy was restricted to the appraised value of the land. This was workable for urban, single-family subdivisions. But it did not come close to penciling for larger multi-family housing co-ops, where several units are placed on a single lot. It also proved challenging for rural homeownership projects, where land values are significantly lower than in urban areas.

So in 2024, following a recommendation from Housing Oregon, a LIFT Homeownership Workgroup was assembled—including OHCS, DOJ, and various homeownership development partners. Through several meetings, significant progress was made on improving the LIFT Homeownership to work more broadly for different types of homeownership projects—most notably shifting to subsidy limits based on unit size rather than land valuation. Around the same time, the Homeownership Division also launched its own version of the OAHTC program, which was formerly only available on the Rental side.

And at the beginning of 2025, the Homeownership Development NOFA was released, which for the first time offered both LIFT and OAHTC compatible with limited-equity co-ops. That allowed us to apply for our Rosa Village Co-op, which brings us back to today where we have secured the first award for this emerging housing model. We are excited to be able to proceed to construction on our next development, and even more so knowing that it will establish a pathway for developing more permanently affordable housing co-ops statewide.

Getting here required broad support from both the state legislature and Oregon Housing & Community Services. We want to give a special thanks Rep. Nancy Nathanson, Sen. James Manning, and the late Rep. Gary Lief for their early support in championing this cause and opening the door to advancing cooperative housing in Oregon. And also to the OHCS Homeownership Division staff for being open to taking on something new, and collaborating with us to achieve more diverse affordable housing options for Oregonians.

We look forward to continuing to work together as we move onward the next phase of this journey!

Andrew Heben,

Executive Director