Pretend the $20 million is guaranteed, and if anything will increase slightly over time.
What problems could be significantly improved for $20 million?
(I am dreaming of winning the $1.55 billion Powerball drawling. Then taking the lumpsum, posting taxes, investing, and spending 4% each and every year. I understand that the actual may be more, or less than the started amount.)
I would identify people in need that are renting a home and taking good care of it. Then I would buy the home and sell it to them for $1.
I know this is pie in the sky, but look into how habitat for humanity does this. You would be causing a lot of trouble for those families.
Tax burdens for the purchase, because you're essentially giving them a lot of money. Kind of like how the people Opera gave cars to couldn't always afford the taxes and ended up having to sell the car.
Also, predatory lenders look for people in that situation and trick them into getting loans on the house to get "free" cash from the equity and then the people just immediately lose their house and end up in the same place.
There are ways to protect them from all of the above, just need a little more than just "give house to good people"
Yeah it's probably smarter to purchase the homes under a trust and then rent them to low-income people for the cost of owning the home.
The stuff you can't escape.
The property taxes. The insurance. Things like that.
Throw in a maintenance fund, broken down into a group fund average with a company on retainer and the salary of three people to manage and maintain all of the properties, collect the minimal rent, manage tenants paperwork and tax reporting and maintenance requests, all the hassle work so that you don't have to.
Depending on where you are even 5 million a year worth of homes could be anywhere between 10 and 50 houses every single year added to the group.
And depending where you are and how that works out that would mean home rental prices somewhere in the $400 to $900 a month price, well below the market average, and well below what these poor people would have to spend to maintain the housing and the associated taxes and insurance fees anyway.
No surprise $15,000 roof jobs. No surprise $5,000 HVAC jobs. No surprise $800 dishwasher replacements.
You could probably also work out a deal with a maintenance company or a contractor who is on board with doing this kind of work for charities sake and pass the savings on to your renters.
All of that maintained and optimized by a fairly simple payment, and the only downside to that is that it would not directly boost the renters wealth via property value increase.
If you then put say like a 5-year cap on how long somebody could rent your property at cost (extending that optionally until their youngest kid turns 21), then that should givethe renters plenty enough time to sort out their financial situations and to accumulate wealth to purchase their own homes or to get themselves into a better position in life, and then you could pass that savings onto the next person.
If you wanted to help these people build their wealth then you could also do something like sell the houses when they move out and give them the value increase after taxes that the house accumulated, or considering that we're in a bit of a housing bubble right now you could also tack on an extra $100 or $200 a month to their rental payments and then refund that money plus any interests that it generated along with any maintenance fee overages that their payments have accumulated during their stay.
The former is a little more risky but could result in a larger payout for your tenants, and the latter costs more for your tenants but how many people get to leave a 5-year rental agreement with a bonus $10,000 to put towards their own house?