Their neighborhood would have once been unaffordable.
Janice Quinci with her children, Frankie, 1, and Sophia, 3, outside their new home in Novato, Calif.
NOVATO, Calif. - Janice Quinci likes nice things: fashionable clothes, dinner out with her husband, a private school for her daughter. With a household income in the six figures, Ms. Quinci can pretty much enjoy it all.
With the notable exception, until now, of a home of her own.
"We figured we would rent our whole lives," Ms. Quinci said. "We didn't really think that we could afford to have a place to ourselves."
Ms. Quinci, 29, was speaking from the front porch of her three-bedroom townhouse here in suburban Marin County, north of San Francisco. She and her husband, Vito, a salesman for a wine distributor, bought it new from a developer last November with no money down and at a steep discount. Inside, the refrigerator was pushed aside as workers laid a new kitchen floor - at no cost to the Quincis - because the original one was not up to snuff.
The Quincis might not look the part, but they are the beneficiaries of an unusual form of public housing that is gaining popularity in real-estate-obsessed America.
Some middle-class families are buying homes at budget prices made possible by government agencies, private developers, not-for-profit groups and employers.
Affordable housing, once shorthand for low rents for the poor, is being stretched like never before to include homeownership for people who are more likely to have Starbucks cash cards than food stamps in their wallets. These middle-income earners, priced out of homes from Burlington, Vt., to Santa Fe, N.M., are being offered financial breaks to live in hot real-estate markets and near their jobs.
"Our thinking is that a healthy middle class is important to the city," said Geoffrey Lewis, assistant director of policy at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, which has overseen the building of hundreds of units reserved for middle-income earners. "We want to keep these people in Boston; they are the glue in the neighborhoods and the glue in the economy as well."
Sometimes called low-cost, work force or inclusionary housing, the cut-price units are most popular in places "suffering from success," as one study described the cities where real estate costs outpaced incomes and where government officials, businesses and housing advocates were struggling to increase homeownership for all but the rich.
Unlike traditional government programs intended for the most disadvantaged, the emphasis is on people with full-time jobs who earn too much to qualify for federal assistance but too little to obtain a conventional mortgage, at least not in the cities or neighborhoods where they want to live.
Typically, those household incomes are 80 percent to 120 percent of the median income, which, in expensive metropolitan areas like San Francisco, Boston and New York, can extend into six figures for a family of four.
Nicolas P. Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, said, "In many places where housing costs have escalated, that historical social contract appears to have been voided, the contract that if you work you can find a decent place to live."
The price breaks are usually not achieved through direct subsidies but a range of cost-cutting programs, including cities making zoning changes for developers, providing land at reduced cost, expediting approvals of building plans and allowing the construction of bigger and more expensive homes elsewhere.
In some programs, like that of Burlington Community Land Trust in Vermont, the units are subsidized with state property transfer taxes. Elsewhere, employers and lenders offer financing packages direct to buyers.
Even in New York City, where efforts to reach out to the squeezed middle class began decades ago with construction of Mitchell-Lama buildings, the ever-growing affordability problem has led to a flurry of new programs, city officials said.
About 200 blocks in the Greenpoint and Williamsburg neighborhoods of Brooklyn were rezoned in May to include incentives for developers to build housing for a range of incomes, including households earning as much 125 percent of the median, something that had previously been reserved for high-priced Manhattan.
"By creating ownership, you are giving moderate income residents a financial stake in their neighborhoods, so they benefit from the improvement rather than be hurt by it," said Shaun Donovan, the housing commissioner in New York.
The spread of the phenomenon is too new and dispersed to be quantified, government officials and housing advocates say, and so far it occupies only a small piece of the nation's affordable housing pie. Still, it is catching the attention of home builders, city planners, educators and business people across the nation, leading to workshops and seminars on the subject as well as a spate of local laws that make it simpler for developers to offer the units.