In Ahualulco de Mercado, Mexico, a mother walks across a patch of red earth that, just two years ago, belonged to someone else. Today, the title is hers. Behind her, neighbors are pouring foundations, stringing electrical lines, and sketching futures into the soil. This is what dignity looks like when it takes physical form — not a handout, but a homestead.
This scene is repeating itself across Latin America, thanks to New Story, a nonprofit rewriting the global playbook on housing. And in 2025, the J.W. Couch Foundation is proud to support their work through a Program Storytelling Grant that will amplify these transformations far beyond a single neighborhood.
A Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
An estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide live without adequate shelter. In Latin America, the math is especially brutal: roughly 80% of families cannot afford a home, and 70% of adults remain unbanked. Land routinely costs ten times what a low-income family can pay, and the traditional path to legal ownership can stretch beyond a decade — when it's accessible at all. Layer on a long history of fraudulent land schemes and predatory lending, and trust itself becomes one of the steepest barriers to overcome.
Most organizations see these obstacles as reasons to offer charity. New Story saw them as reasons to redesign the system.
A Different Founding Idea
Founded in 2014, New Story was built on a radical belief: vulnerable families don't want handouts — they want access. They want to participate in a housing market that has historically shut them out. That belief shaped a three-step model unlike anything else in the sector.
First, New Story secures underused land and develops the essential infrastructure — roads, power, water, and sanitation — that turns dirt into a viable community. Next, families make small, manageable monthly payments and earn legal title to their land in just 24 months, rather than the typical ten-plus years. Finally, with land as collateral, families build credit and qualify for home loans, allowing them to build or purchase a home of their own.
Land. Credit. Home. A simple progression that quietly upends generations of exclusion.
Impact Measured in Families
At the Ahualulco de Mercado project, 401 families are now on the path to homeownership — and remarkably, 66.5% of titles are held by women, more than double Mexico's national average. In 2025 alone, New Story kicked off six new master-planned, mixed-use neighborhoods, opening doors for 2,000 more first-time landowners. By 2027, they aim to reach 10,000 families.
The track record is hard to argue with: families reach land ownership five times faster than traditional methods. Portfolio repayment sits at 100%. Land values in New Story communities have doubled within three years. Since founding, the organization has raised more than $80 million, built thousands of homes, and impacted approximately 20,000 individuals across Haiti, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Mexico. Along the way, New Story graduated from Y Combinator, earned four nods from Fast Company as one of the World's Most Innovative Companies, and built the world's first community of 3D-printed homes.
