Homeownership Opportunities Beyond Single-Family: Quantifying the Current Landscape

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Executive Summary

Although homeownership is commonly portrayed as a single household living in a detached residential structure, the landscape of homeownership in the United States offers a diverse array of homeownership opportunities beyond traditional single-family homes with a single or married-couple borrower(s), some of which provide more affordable entry points into homeownership for low- and moderate-income (LMI) households. This brief identifies and quantifies these homeownership types for the United States and Western U.S. states in the 12th Federal Reserve District.1 These homeownership types include condominiums (condos), housing cooperatives (co-ops), community land trusts (CLTs), tenancies in common (TICs), multiunit buildings with an onsite owner, homes with accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and homeowners sharing a unit with extended family or others. The brief develops a typology organizing these homeownership categories by whether they involve shared ownership, a shared property, or shared occupancy. The brief outlines and contextualizes each homeownership type and provides estimated unit counts for each geographic scale, where possible. It then discusses innovations in the community development field, as well as outstanding barriers to development and lending for new units in different homeownership categories. Finally, the brief outlines additional research and data collection needed to further clarify the accessibility and distribution of these homeownership types.

Key Findings

• There are approximately 5.4 million owner-occupied condos in the United States, making up about 6.3% of total owner-occupied homes. There are 1.3 million owner-occupied condos in the Western United States (defined as states in the 12th Federal Reserve District). 
  • Within the Western United States, owner-occupied condos are most prevalent In Hawaiʻi (18% of housing stock is owner-occupied condos, and 19% is non-owner-occupied condos), followed by California (6% owner-occupied condos and 3% non-owner-occupied condos), and Utah and Arizona (both are about 5% owner-occupied condos and 4% non-owner-occupied condos), while Nevada, like Hawaiʻi, has a smaller share of owner-occupied condos (3%) than non-owner-occupied condos (7%).

• We estimate that there are at least 614,000 housing units in cooperatives (co-ops) nationally, 25,000 of which are in the Western United States. Units in co-ops make up about 0.7% of U.S. owner-occupied homes. 
  • The largest number of co-ops in the Western United States are in  Hawaiʻi and California, concentrated primarily in Maui and the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles regions. 

• We estimate that there are over 3,200 community land trust (CLT) or similar shared equity (SE) homeownership units in the Western United States out of over 15,000 in the United States. Homeownership units in a CLT/SE portfolio make up about 0.02% of U.S. owner-occupied homes. 
  • The largest numbers of CLT/SE ownership units in the West are in Washington (1,794), Oregon (477), California (410), Arizona (248), and Idaho (160), and there are a handful of CLT ownership units in Hawaiʻi (44), Utah (17), Alaska (5), and Nevada (1).  

• There are about 174,000 TIC (tenancy in common) ownership units in the United States, about 46,000 of which are in the Western United States. TIC units make up about 0.2% of U.S. owner-occupied homes.  
  • California has, by far, the largest number of TIC units in the West (and nationally) at 34,600, followed by Washington (4,700), Utah (4,600), Oregon (2,500), Hawaiʻi (1,600), and Alaska (1,300).  

• Most (non-condo) units in multifamily buildings with an onsite owner are in small two- to four-unit buildings in the United States (71%) and in the West (67%). There are about 1.6 million non-condo units in multiunit buildings with an owner-occupant in the United States, 150,000 (10%) of which are in Western states.    

• We estimate that there are at least 1.6 million accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in the United States and 427,000 in the Western United States. For comparison, the number of single-family homes with an ADU is almost a third of the number of owner-occupied condos in the United States. 
  • California has the most ADUs in the Western United States (and nationally), with at least 201,000, followed by Washington (over 77,800), Arizona (over 36,000), Oregon (35,906), Hawaiʻi (over 14,700), and Idaho (over 12,700). 

• We include homeowners sharing a unit with extended family or other adults in this analysis because they may represent households that are sharing homeownership costs and may signal potential unmet demand for (co)ownership opportunities and, in some cases, overcrowding due to high housing costs.  
  • A quarter (25%) of owner-occupied U.S. households, and nearly a third (31%) in the Western United States, have either extended family or unrelated adults living in the same housing unit. Most homeowners sharing a unit live in single-family homes. 
  • Five percent of U.S. owner-occupied households and 8% of Western U.S. owner-occupied households experience overcrowding (>1 person per room in a housing unit). The highest rates of overcrowding are in Hawaiʻi (12.3%), Alaska (10.2%), and California (9.8%), followed by Arizona (6.7%). 

End Notes

1. We refer to the states in the 12th Federal Reserve District interchangeably as “Western U.S. states” and “the Western United States” for discussion purposes. These states include Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaiʻi, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.

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