The HUD does have multi family housing loans, rural loans, affordable housing loans and even loans for farm labourer dwellings.
A loan depends on the ability of the borrower to pay it back. Everywhere, land has appreciating value and the dwelling itself is a depreciating asset. It is obvious why because land is limited and we can’t create new land. Also given that the population growth is exponential, the value of land keeps rising and hence the cost of housing.
There arent tons of financing programs for co housing and group homes because lenders like to select only borrowers who have collateral that can be resold. The reason is that Americans don’t want Co housing or group homes. If there is a demand and trend of qualified borrowers who can build and hold and increase assured re sale value, there is no reason why there wouldn’t be loans for it.
Remember ..for a lender..to back a loan for a co housing project, he has to see a viability to sell it to more than one competitor. And there just isn’t demand because low housing stock and housing affordability is an uniquely tier 1 city problem. Middle America and most economically depressed parts of the country still have lots of land.
It comes back to density. I have looked at this every way possible. Although I can’t claim to have worked on this issue, my mother worked thirty years in the affordable housing sector. I spent most of my after school hours doing homework at her place of work in meeting rooms while listening in... Favoring high density at the cost of stressed infrastructure is desirable only in the United States. No one else who have lived in high density cities around the world will get it.
That’s because there is a difference between crowded and high density. Former is cramming a lot of people with fixed or diminishing resources. The latter is densely packing more people while allocating resources and infrastructure equitably to everyone to optimize sustainability indices. America doesn’t understand high density sustainability.
Property is the most desirable form of investment because as I mentioned before we can’t create more land. We can create more living space by building vertical etc but again, more land is more vertical value and this still operates on scarcity principle. The outcome would be housing unaffordablility.
Living with room mates is rather common in most parts of the world. One can’t modify a financial instrument like a mortgage to manipulate value of an appreciating immovable non replicating asset like land.
It’s an interesting problem, but it’s not a financial problem. It’s a cultural one.