Housing Ladder

The housing ladder refers to a series of stages in renting or homeownership where people may first rent or buy a smaller or more affordable home and then go on to buy a larger or more expensive home after building equity in order to meet their changing housing needs. In today’s housing market, people are having an increasingly difficult time getting on this ladder and buying their first home. 

Dana Reserve will have a spectrum of houses across the ladder– with units for rent and for sale– and will have a program in place to help first time homebuyers get on the ladder. There are a variety of housing types in this project to help people find the home that best meets their needs:

  • People’s Self Help Housing units for low, very low, and extremely low income levels
  • Moderate, workforce, & missing middle housing. These include multi-family, single-family detached with shared driveways, and single-family detached on individual lots.
  • ADUs.
  • Larger lot and primarily single-story homes.

With the Planning Commission’s recommended changes (increasing PSHH units and adding ADUs), this pie chart shows the levels of the project’s affordability by percent. This project has the largest scale of affordability of any project in SLO County, with over 50% of the project planned as extremely low to workforce housing, with additional units also planned for the missing middle.

*Assumes Neighborhood 2 is for rent. If for sale, 105 units move from moderate to workforce.

Neighborhoods 1 and 10 will be for rent, with 10A and 10B’s rents being deed-restricted for those with low, very low, and extremely low income levels. As of 2023, homes for sale in neighborhoods 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are forecasted to be the most affordable by square foot and by home price of all new home communities for sale within SLO County and cities.

This graph, researched and compiled by New Home Guru, compares the price per square foot of all new home communities in SLO County and Cities in 2023. As shown in the graph, all non-Shea homes (Shea homes are NBDs 7, 8, and 9) at Dana Reserve are projected to be most affordable by square foot and home price.