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HomeBuyNow by
Dan Hoffman
More than 35 years ago the University of Pennsylvania created what became one of the nation’s most successful and
well-known employer-assisted housing programs. Today the program, which seeded the neighborhood surrounding
Penn with university employees (and their purchasing power), is universally credited with playing a key role in revitalizing
the University City neighborhood, once among the City’s most distressed and now a premier city location.
Yet despite this example of how employer-assisted housing could be used to stabilize and improve a neighborhood
(important to Penn in recruiting faculty and students) exactly zero Philadelphia employers followed Penn’s example
during the ensuing three decades.
The exact reasons for employers not emulating the Penn example are difficult to know, but clearly some:
- thought only wealthy, well-endowed employers could offer a housing benefit.
- continued to not understand how a housing benefit can solve problems of critical concern to employers.
- didn’t know how to offer a benefit, even if they believed doing so would be useful.
The HomeBuyNow Partnership
Many believed that Penn was exceptional case and that the inactions of other employers equaled employer indifference
to the issue of housing benefits. Then HomeBuyNow happened.
HomeBuyNow is a partnership between the Philadelphia Office of Neighborhood Transformation, the Greater
Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition (GPUAC), which managed the program for the City and Dan Hoffman who has
provided program design and marketing guidance to GPUAC. The program provides matching grants to employees
whose employers also provide cash to employees to help those employees purchase a home in the city. The program
also offers home improvement financing, home energy audits and a range of housing counseling activities, which also
require employer participation to access. View the Program Brochure at the GPUAC website (click here).
In less than 18 months of marketing about three dozen employers have enrolled in HomeBuyNow or are in the process
of doing so. These employers encompass more than 11,000 employees.
Most encouraging is the wide variety of employers who chosen to offer a housing benefit. Ranging from educational,
social service and health care providers, an HMO, a private school, community-based nonprofit organizations, law firms,
lenders and small businesses, this variation indicates that employer-assisted housing is not a niche product, useful to
specialized types of employers, but rather a benefit that all types of employers can find useful.
About a quarter of employers target their benefit to neighborhoods adjacent to corporate facilities while others enable
employees to purchase a home anywhere in the city. Employee home purchases have ranged from $20,000 to more
than $500,000 with the median price being $164,320 and the average being $120,000.
HomeBuyNow is proving that by providing employers with a clear explanation of how a housing benefit adds to the
bottom line and an efficient, cost-effective, third-party managed benefit to access, employer interest in offering useful
housing benefits can be dramatically increased.
Find out how your community can create an effective EAH Housing Strategy--contact Dan Hoffman at this website.