Will there be more rent-to-own arrangements going forward?

At Gravity, a new apartment complex in Columbus, Ohio, every resident will have an ownership stake in their own community—starting at $50 per household.

“Our vision is to turn every renter into an owner,” says Calvin Cooper, CEO and founder of Rhove, a financial technology company based in Columbus.

Politicians, housing advocates and developers used to talk about the value of owning a home. That largely stopped in the years after the housing crash and the Global Financial Crisis, in which millions of people lost homes to foreclosure. Housing advocates now call for Congress to support a new wave of home construction, both to ease the shortage of housing and create jobs for some of the people who became unemployed as a result of the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. And on a much smaller scale, entrepreneurs are creating ways for renters to become stakeholders in their own apartment communities.

Advocates call for affordable homeownership

In the years before the housing boom and bust, developers regularly built more than a million new single-family homes a year. That shrank to as little as 400,000 in the years after the crisis and has only gradually ramped up in recent years. Home loans have been hard to get, especially for young millennials burdened with outsized debts from college loans.