Building Innovation for Home Ownership

 - Hemant G.

The building innovation for home ownership (BIH) program is an imitative of the national partners in homeownership in order to maximize the possibility of owing a home in America. Various public, private and non profit organizations came together to start various projects and actions with a view increase the housing opportunities and also aimed to add 8 million mew homeowners by 2000. The goal was aim to be achieved through a strong collaboration between the public and private housing industries.

This partnership aimed to reduce the cost involved in housing which is also the primary strategy of the Building Innovation for Homeownership program.

Now the main requirement for encouraging people to adopt such innovation is proper awareness and education.

Basically the BIH program was established for the reorganization of housing projects all over America that make use of innovative technology and designs in building homes so as to make the dream of American Homeownership a reality. Being an awards program the aim of BIH was select winners which would highlight the innovations made by those winners so that the same could be used throughout the country by builders and contractors. The projects which were eligible for taking part in BIH were those who made use of technology which was generally available and not experimental. Also the cost of the was required to  be less than the median cost of single family housing in the area where the project was intended to be implemented. All the non profit organizations serving people belonging to the low income group and also manufactured, modular and industries using site built technologies were encouraged to apply.

The BIH was juried by the representatives from the HUD and of course the Partnership board. Finally the jury short listed 63 winners. Apart from giving awards the National Partners in the BIH are also working with the developers of these award winning projects in order to ensure their success and to offer the potential buyers various benefits of homeownership. Various extensive programs are also offered by some of the partners to provide various financing options to the intended buyers which are very rarely available in the market.

Thus a number of partners want to make available these programs to the projects that win and HUD has assured that the FHA, HOME and the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) and various other counseling programs will support these award winning projects.