With million-dollar homes out of reach for most middle-income families, some Bay Area employers are experimenting with down payment assistance
San Mateo County social worker Aldo Quintero and his wife, Liza, make respectable salaries in their government jobs, but in a region with a median home price of $1.4 million and a county where the figure reaches $2.2 million, a home for the couple and their two kids in the community they serve was out of reach.
For years, Quintero commuted an hour-plus across the Bay from Hayward, and though they later found a small rental in the San Mateo County town of Belmont, their pay wasn’t enough for them to afford a home of their own.
“Even as I got raises and better-paying jobs, it’s like I couldn’t catch up to where prices were,” said Quintero, who earns $144,000 not including benefits.
Each year, the Quinteros entered a program sponsored by the county for its employees — a lottery awarding 20 loans of up to $100,000 toward the purchase of a home in San Mateo County. In 2023, they won. Along with the loan, they scraped together their savings plus money from their family to put in an offer of $780,000 for a two-bedroom, one-bath condo in Foster City, just a 10-minute drive from work and their children’s school.
“We got used to these hour-long commutes, and now that we don’t have to do that, it’s such a privilege,” Quintero said. “We have so much more time to spend on other things.”
Employee housing stipends have long been a feature of high-paying jobs in the corporate world, but the middle-income workers educating children, repairing roads and working in hospitals often must look far from where they work to find a home they can afford to rent, let alone buy.
To give their employees a fighting chance in the housing market, some local governments, universities and hospitals are offering down payment assistance as an employee benefit.
