Prior to the housing markets, banks had no problem with lending money to low income and other disenfranchised groups. The loans provided a very low mortgage payment and interest rate for only a set time period. Once the time period ended, a large balloon payment became due and interest rates spiked. This practice created in large part, the decline of the housing market as many eventually defaulted on the loans.
Once the housing market crashed, special federal and state home ownership loan programs were created to assist low-income and any other frigidly future home buyers, to purchase many houses left empty on the crashed housing market. Programs ranged from first time home buyer loans to closing costs loans. The idea was to make it as easy to obtain the necessary funds for a home for everyone.
A decade later, can we say that both states and the federal government in fact made purchasing a home safe and affordable to all? Well, that depends who you include in “everyone.” Does everyone include frigidity future home buyers? Or does everyone include the same low-income families?
For individuals with disabilities, they fit both categories. Individuals with disabilities are frigidity future home buyers for the difficult task of finding a home that could possible meet all of their accommodations needs. It’s not like there are an abundance single family homes that are wheelchair or otherwise accessible to the disability community. How do you go about modifying a home that you just bought? How to pay for it with no equity in the home? Compounding this dilemma is the fact that individuals with disabilities are also low-income.
The answer then should be that individuals with disabilities are everyone since they both are future frigid home buyers and low-income. With that in mind we should have seen federal and state home buyer loan programs for the disabled. However, that depended if you lived in the right state.
Very few states in fact had any homeownership loan programs for the disabled. In fact only ten states had such programs; WA, OR, MT, ND, TX, IL, KY, TN, MS, NY, CT, MD. When digging deeper to see if any states had loan programs to assist with modification of a home, I found a few more states. Specifically, the states are: AL, NM, GA, PA. But the focus of modification was for current home owners and often limited to the elderly. Granted this would prevent a home from going on the market but falls flat on helping buying any new home.
What could cause this do you say? It’s hard to say. I can tell you that is not from lack of demand as many believed. Individuals with disabilities are the largest minority group in the US. In fact, one out five, citizens are disabled! Can you imagine how quickly the housing market and the economy as a whole would have quickly recovered if the states had included people with disabilities. You would have gotten foreclosed houses off the market and provided a home that could provide a better environment for the health and safety of the disability community. A win-win for all.
In conclusion, the overwhelming lack of effort and interest by the states to provide the same opportunities of home ownership during the housing market does not describe who is everyone, it really says anyone else.