By Josh McKnight | The McKnight Team
Habitat for Humanity of Bucks County and developer W.B. Homes are selling seven income-restricted three-bedroom townhomes inside Thatcher Square, a 34-home development at 1492 Woodbourne Road in Middletown Township. Four are reserved for households at up to 80 percent of county median family income, three at up to 120 percent.
Bucks County affordable housing usually means something else entirely, and the detail that surprises people here is the qualifying ceiling: household incomes as high as $195,000 may qualify depending on family size.
How a Community Land Trust Keeps a Home Affordable Twice
Habitat will offer mortgages between $100,000 and $450,000, structured with what it calls quiet liens. Applicants must live or work in Bucks County, demonstrate financial need, carry a credit score of at least 600, and contribute labor toward building future Habitat homes.
The structural piece is the community land trust. The homes are sold through it, which means the affordability restriction travels with the property rather than expiring at the first resale. A conventional subsidy houses one family and then evaporates into the market at full price. A land trust houses that family, and the next one, and the one after that.
The tradeoff is real. If you buy into a land trust, you give up a share of future appreciation in exchange for getting in at all. That is a genuine cost to you, not a technicality, and you should price it honestly before you apply.
What Bucks County Affordable Housing Actually Has to Compete With
The $195,000 ceiling reads absurd until you price the alternative. That is the point of the program. Not poverty housing. Workforce housing. The people who work in the county and cannot buy in it.
Set that against what the numbers show right now. The average Bucks County home value is $530,927, up 3.3 percent over the past year, with homes going to pending in around seven days, per Zillow data through July 31, 2026. In Langhorne, the postal area covering much of Middletown Township, the average sits at $595,464, up 3.6 percent, with homes going to pending in around five days.
Five days. That is the competition a first-time buyer faces here.
Why the Missing Middle Is the Hardest Group to House
Housing policy is built at two ends. Deep subsidy programs serve households well below median income. The private market serves everyone who can produce a down payment and clear a debt-to-income ratio at prevailing prices. The gap between those two is where a household earning $110,000 in a county with a $530,927 average home value ends up: too much income for assistance, too little for the market that assistance was supposed to be unnecessary for.
That gap widened for a specific reason. Wages moved. Home values moved considerably more. Pennsylvania is on pace to fall roughly 185,000 units short of what it needs by 2035, and shortfalls do not distribute evenly. They concentrate in exactly the price band the missing middle shops.
Seven townhomes do not fix that. Nobody involved claims otherwise. What seven townhomes do is show you a mechanism that works at scale if a municipality chooses to use it, which is why Bucks County affordable housing policy is worth your attention even if you never apply to a program. Reasonable people land differently on whether land trusts are the right tool, because they constrain appreciation, and appreciation is how most American households build wealth.
If you know somebody who works in Bucks County and has given up on buying here, tell them programs like this exist. Most never hear about them.
What This Means for You
If you earn between roughly 80 and 120 percent of the area median and you have been told you do not qualify for anything, verify that. The income ceilings on land trust and workforce programs run considerably higher than most people assume, and they scale with household size. If you are selling in Middletown Township, understand that income-restricted units inside a market-rate development do not depress the market-rate homes around them. Thatcher Square is 34 homes. Seven carry restrictions. Twenty-seven do not.
The practical work is knowing which programs exist and when applications open, because those windows are short and poorly advertised. Middletown Township sits largely in the Langhorne postal area, where inventory rose about 40 percent this year and homes still move in a median 17 days. The current picture on our Langhorne PA homes for sale page is worth reviewing before you decide the county is out of reach.
Thinking about buying or selling in Middletown Township or Bucks County? Let’s talk.
Join The Discussion