Jacqueline Knox surveys her back yard on a dewy summer morning. Talking over the sound of roosters that roam her East Tampa neighborhood, she describes what being a homeowner means to her.
“Land. A piece of dirt that I own, that I will be able to share with family, friends. [It’s] something that I look forward to,” she said.
For a long time, Knox said the dream of homeownership felt out of reach for her.
As a Black woman and a single parent living in Tampa, she said it was difficult to afford stable housing despite working full time. There were times when her family had to sleep in the car. She said saving money for future expenses, like a down payment on a house, was out of the question.
“A lot of times the reality of your dream becoming true – in my shoes – was slim to none,” she said.
In April, Knox closed on her first home through Tampa’s Dare to Own the Dream program. She is one of 285 Tampa residents since 2018 who became a first-time homebuyer using the program, according to city housing records.
A powerful tool for first-time homebuyers in Tampa
The Dare program is one of two strategies Tampa leaders are using to reduce barriers to homeownership, bolster the supply of affordable homes and give local homebuyers an edge against corporate investors in the market.
The other part of the city’s strategy, its infill housing initiative, is to partner with public and private developers to build affordable homes on city-owned lots that are off limits to investor purchase. It’s also one way that the city is chipping away at a goal of providing 10,000 affordable homes for working families by the end of 2027.
“With rising housing prices, the last thing we want is for residents to be pushed out of their community because they no longer can afford to live there. I am proud of the work our Housing and Community Development Team has accomplished with the Dare to Own the Dream and Infill Housing Programs, as they work tirelessly to ensure families who want to purchase homes, can do so,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said in a written statement.
Like in many U.S. cities, Tampa’s single-family housing market has seen a recent influx of corporate investors who often flip the homes to resell at a higher price or convert them into long-term rentals. This often sidelines traditional would-be buyers, drives up prices and reduces affordability. The hotbeds for this activity are in predominantly Black neighborhoods, including East Tampa, Ybor city and West Tampa, according to a recent WUSF analysis of property records.
When Tampa’s Dare and infill programs are used together, Tampa realtor Kristin Washington said it's become an especially effective tool for first-time homebuyers who are Black.
Of the nearly 46 Tampa residents who used the DARE and infill housing programs together, at least 35% were Black homebuyers, according to available data from 2018 to 2024 (some applicants chose not to disclose their race and some are unrecorded). Of this group, 69% bought homes in zip codes where Black residents made up more than 30% of households according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
The pair of initiatives is not designed to exclusively help first-time homebuyers who are Black. As mandated by the Fair Housing Act, eligibility for the Tampa’s Dare program is based on income guidelines and is not limited to certain racial groups.
Still, housing experts say the programs are improving homeownership rates among Black residents in Tampa, which lagged by around 27% in 2022, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
“Black homeownership, for the longest [time], in our minds has not been achievable,” Washington said. “I have seen this program bridge the gap. I've seen the success stories. And that's why I'm so [in]vested.”
How it works
Through the DARE program, homebuyers who earn less than $100,000 a year as a single person in Tampa are eligible for up to $40,000 in down payment assistance toward a home that costs up to $350,000, according to the latest guidelines. On average, homebuyers in the DARE program receive around $20,000 to put toward a $200,000 home, according to city housing records from 2018 to 2024.
That was the case for Knox. She qualified for $20,000 in down payment assistance when she bought her house listed at $350,000. To receive the funds, she was also required to complete a homebuyer education course, a service that’s offered by all four partnering nonprofits. She enrolled in an eight-hour class that was taught over three days, making it accessible for working professionals.
"They don't overwhelm you. They give you a slew of information, but it's all valuable to your process," Knox said.
Knox completed the DARE program and purchased a home through the Housing Education Alliance. It’s one of four nonprofits and certified housing counseling agencies that partner with the Tampa program.
“This could not have been possible without DARE,” she said. “No way — because they help tremendously with the down payment and closing costs.”
Frank Cornier is the CEO of Tampa Bay Neighborhood Housing Services, one of the four nonprofits working with the city.
He said that the City of Tampa’s DARE program is not a new concept. He said there are other cities that earmark public funding for homebuying assistance programs. Before DARE, the City of Tampa operated a similar initiative to help residents purchase a home, too.
The DARE program is funded through state and federal housing grants, including the State Housing Initiatives Partnership Program, or SHIP dollars, and the Home Investment Partnerships Program, a federal block grant issued by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to city records. Cornier said that what sets the city’s current efforts apart is their creativity in layering public funds and collaboration with local partners.
“What the City of Tampa is doing is… using all of the tools that are available at its disposal to help low- to moderate-income families become homeowners. I think that the City of Tampa is really progressive in their approach,” he said. He said the city also benefits from its willingness to partner with community-based organizations that have worked to earn the trust of Tampa’s Black and Latino residents.
And when the DARE program, primarily a financing instrument, works together with the city’s infill housing initiative, data shows it creates new opportunities for Black homeownership.
Systemic barriers to Black homeownership in Tampa
That’s important considering the systemic barriers to Black homeownership that have existed in Tampa, going back decades, according to local historian Rodney Kite-Powell, director of the Touchton Map Library at the Tampa Bay History Center.
Like in many U.S. cities, residents in Tampa’s predominantly Black neighborhoods have been routinely displaced in favor of new infrastructure like highways, and discriminated against by unfair zoning practices. More than 70 years of Tampa’s inequitable planning and zoning practices were recently detailed in a 2021 Non-discrimination and equity report published by Plan Hillsborough, an agency that makes policy recommendations to Hillsborough County.
Knox said she was wary, at first, to rely on a government program to help her buy a house. She said she grew up watching how Black neighborhoods in Tampa were often built through by the highways, or cleared out to create new public housing projects, but very rarely built up for the Black community to stay. She said this has created a lot of distrust of government programs among Black residents in Tampa.
Kite-Powell said one example is the construction of Interstate 275 that cuts through the Seminole Heights and Tampa Heights neighborhoods, splitting up tight-knit Black communities.
“Looking at things like the interstate highway systems and large-scale federal dollar projects or large-scale state dollar projects, when they need big chunks of land it's those people who have the least economic power and the least political power that are generally targeted to have their land taken away,” he said.
Before highways bulldozed Black neighborhoods, there were other barriers to homeownership. In the early 1900s, it was common for deed restrictions and other restrictive covenants to prohibit property from being “sold or rented to African Americans, and often included other racial and ethnic minorities,” according to the Hillsborough equity report. In Tampa neighborhoods where Black citizens were permitted to own property, residents were often denied home loans due to discriminatory lending practices such as redlining.
While many of these practices are outlawed today, they had long-lasting negative impacts on Black homebuyers in Tampa. Kite-Powell said that racist zoning and planning policies hurt Black residents' ability to purchase homes, establish credit and securely pass down property to heirs.
These repercussions are compounded by new challenges to homeownership today.
In July, the average home price in Hillsborough County was $400,000, which steadily increased from $325,000 in 2021, according to the latest data from Redfin. With a renewed investor interest, many predominantly Black neighborhoods in Tampa are becoming vulnerable to gentrification.
“The way to … protect against forces like gentrification … [is to] maintain ownership of your home … That allows you then to pass that home down to the next generation,” Kite-Powell said.
Building back trust
In her experience, Knox said she often had to choose between working full-time or taking a promotion at work, and qualifying for public assistance that was designed to help low-income households.
“I can’t have a job that’s going to pay me enough money and still be able to get benefits. It’s either or. You can’t have both.”
This conundrum is because maximum income requirements for public assistance programs are often based on the federal poverty line, a measurement that has not been updated since the 1960s. Then it was calculated based on the cost of food, whereas now housing consumes a larger part of household budgets.
“There’s a difference between affordability and approvability."CEO of Solita's House Aidza Antonio-Thomas
As many economic advocacy groups, like United for ALICE, have pointed out, the federal poverty line notoriously undercounts families facing financial hardship and forces many low- to moderate-income households to make decisions between earning more money and qualifying for public assistance. That’s especially true as the cost of basic needs, especially housing, have outpaced wages. In the 1960s, the federal poverty line was based on the cost of food, whereas now the cost of housing consumes a larger part of our income. United for ALICE is proposing a new measurement for cost of living.
Despite her disappointment in public assistance programs in the past, Knox enrolled in the Dare program last year after hearing about it at church.
“When, collectively, you have a village that comes together, a lot can be accomplished,” Knox said.
It’s not a silver bullet
Housing experts in Tampa have raised questions about whether the Dare program can keep pace with the record growth and influx of new development.
Aidza Antonio-Thomas, CEO of Solita’s House, one of the four local nonprofits that partners with DARE that offers homebuying education courses in English and Spanish, said she is unsure if the program will remain a sustainable homebuying solution for Tampa’s low- to moderate-income families.
Under its current structure, qualifying homebuyers can put their homebuying assistance toward a home that costs up to $350,000, according to the city website. That cap has already increased once from $300,000, she said.
Outside of down-payment and closing costs, Antonio-Thomas said there are additional expenses, like insurance rates and property taxes, that are increasing in Florida.
“There’s a difference between affordability and approvability,” she said. Although homes may become more affordable in terms of cost, potential home buyers must still meet qualifications to be approved for a mortgage — those include tangibles like sustainable income and eligible credit scores. From 2018 to 2024, the number of canceled home contracts jumped from 9 to 15 percent. This could be for a variety of reasons ranging from a potential buyer’s eligibility to failed inspections.
There’s also been concern over which lots the city of Tampa assigns to developers. In 2018, during the first phase of development through the city of Tampa’s infill housing program, officials were criticized for granting around 75 lots to a single builder, Domain Homes.
An expert in the industry who closely followed the first phase of the city’s infill process and requested anonymity because of their position in the housing market said that Domain Homes was building three or four market-rate homes adjacent to every city-owned lot it was awarded. Critics said this practice went against the intended goal of the infill housing program and made developing neighborhoods vulnerable to increased property values and gentrification.
The process for assigning city-owned lots to developers has since changed.
In 2021, during the second phase of the city’s infill housing development, there were at least 11 private and nonprofit home builders, including AAA Restoration & Builders and Habitat for Humanity Hillsborough, according to housing records obtained from the City of Tampa.
Through the first and second phases of the city's infill housing program, spanning the years 2017 to 2021, there were around 110 lots sold or transferred to affordable housing developers, according to internal city housing records. During phase three of the infill housing program, which is currently underway, the City of Tampa has plans to award around 20 lots to developers and nonprofit agencies.
Last year, the Tampa City Council designated 27 lots for future affordable housing development, according to a city housing dashboard.
Jacqueline Knox said she couldn’t have afforded her home without the financial assistance Tampa offered, but what made the difference for her was the people running the program. Knox said she often thinks about the April day she closed on her home. It was the first time she saw all of the people who helped her together in one room.
“That meant the world to me,” she said. “I can see a Black male, Black women, Latino woman … together, we connected on one accord.”
For Knox, this program is about more than receiving assistance. She said it’s about hope for Black homebuyers in Tampa.
This story is part of Agents of change: Community efforts to overcome racial inequities, an editorial series created in collaboration with Report for America, with the support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, that highlights the efforts of local communities to address racial inequalities through grassroots approaches. Gabriella Paul covers the stories of people living paycheck to paycheck in the greater Tampa Bay region for WUSF. Here’s how you can share your story with her.
