HomeSight’s Director of Real Estate Development, Uche Okezie, is a Woman on a Mission to Bring Co-ops to Seattle
HomeSight’s Director of Real Estate Development, Uche Okezie, is a Woman on a Mission to Bring Co-ops to SeattlE!
It’s not a condo, and it’s not communal housing, but a co-op is a model that’s worked to provide affordable homeownership opportunity in hard-to-afford cities.
People may not be familiar with the word ‘ʔúləx̌’ – it’s the Lushootseed word for ‘gather’ – but the word ‘co-op’ should be in every Seattle homebuyer’s vocabulary, according to HomeSight’s Real Estate Development Director Uche Okezie.
Cooperative homes are common in historically expensive east-coast cities, but most Seattleites have never heard of them. However, Seattle’s changing homeownership climate played a major role in Okezie’s decision to bring the limited equity cooperative (or LEC) model to Seattle.
Since HomeSight began working to help people purchase homes 30 years ago, “things have changed in Seattle,” Okezie explained. “Land is more expensive. HomeSight typically relied on down-payment assistance to help income-qualified folks purchase homes, but there’s just not enough to cover the gap in affordability between what they can afford and what the market says they have to pay in order to purchase it.”
Okezie said an LEC provided “another pathway to provide that first level of affordability.”
Sometimes described as the ‘first rung’ of the ladder to homeownership, co-ops make everyone who is a resident in the building a part owner of the building. Co-op purchasers, said Okezie, “have bought shares that give them the right to live in their unit for however long they own their shares. It gives each household, or member, a vote in all the building operations. Whether it’s the budget, or the board of directors — who are elected co-op members – their share gives them a vote on what happens with their building and in their community, and that community is the building.”
Okezie said community is a significant difference between condo ownership and co-op ownership. “Because everybody owns the building cooperatively, they all have a vested interest in its destiny, its future, and they have the right to communicate that to their fellow members, the people with whom they share this asset,” said Okezie. “And although you are building your individual wealth with the purchase of your shares, you’re also collectively building wealth in the form of the asset that you all live in and share.”
The biggest stumbling block for buyers is unfamiliarity. “It’s just not a common model here,” said Okezie. “I would love for this to be something that was completely normalized and another homeownership option for people.”
The dream of homeownership can be realized for more people with “more co-ops, more limited equity co-ops, and more demand for these units.” Okezie wants co-op ownership to be “just as commonplace as saying: ‘I own a condo.’”
U-lex @ Othello Square has just 20 units remaining for sale to income-qualified buyers. Situated next to the light rail station at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and South Holly Park Drive, U-lex will offer 68 units affordable to families earning 80 percent or less of the area’s median income at the time of purchase. To be eligible, purchasers must meet the income requirements, be first-time homebuyers, or have not owned a home in the past three years. Learn more about U-lex here.
