We are pleased to share some good news from a client and partner organization: Twin City Housing Collective (TCHC) has been awarded $50,000 by The Winston-Salem Foundation through its 2026 housing funding cycle to launch From Voice to Ownership: Catalyzing a Resident-Led Renter-to-Landlord Pipeline in Forsyth County.
TCHC serves as the coordinating backbone for gentle-density affordable housing infill in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, aligning people, land, and capital so that residents most at risk of displacement can stay rooted, build wealth, and shape the neighborhoods they call home. The organization leads the Gentle Density Infill Working Group within the Forsyth County Humane Housing Network and works across four reinforcing tracks: community land trust and land bank development, gentle-density infill, institutionalized resident voice, and capital alignment.
The awarded program has two reinforcing components. The first is the operational launch of TCHC’s Resident Advisory Council, a permanent, stipended body of community members with lived experience of low- and moderate-income housing, chartered in TCHC’s bylaws in April 2026. Funding supports stipends, facilitation, meetings held in neighborhood venues rather than institutional settings, multilingual outreach, and a structured role for the Council in program design decisions. The second component is the first cohort of TCHC’s Renter-to-Landlord Pipeline, which supports cost-burdened renters in becoming owner-occupants of duplexes and other small multi-unit properties in the neighborhoods where they already live: living in one unit, renting the others affordably, and building wealth that can be passed to the next generation.
The strategy responds to three documented failures in Forsyth County’s homeownership pathway, drawn from the Humane Housing Network’s 2025–2026 assessment work: small-dollar mortgages for modest homes are systematically unavailable; investor cash buyers dominate purchases of the county’s naturally occurring affordable housing, channeling rents to absentee owners; and no existing local program targets the two-to-four-unit, owner-occupant pathway, the missing middle rung of the tenure ladder. In a county with more than 25,000 cost-burdened households, converting even a modest number of small multifamily properties to resident ownership produces immediate affordable units, keeps rental income in the community, and creates genuine economic mobility rather than housing stability alone.
In the interest of transparency: IRI provides organizational development and strategic planning consulting to TCHC, and Dr. Stephen Sills currently serves as the organization’s Interim Executive Director. We are grateful to The Winston-Salem Foundation for its investment in resident-led housing solutions, and we look forward to reporting on the pipeline’s first cohort as the work unfolds.
This program is supported by a grant from The Winston-Salem Foundation.
