“It’s an opportunity we would never have realized otherwise,” she said Thursday, Jan. 14.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown announced the competitive grant awards Thursday in Columbus.
The city’s application focused on a rehab program in two neighborhoods — one east of Wittenberg University and the other west of the downtown hospital.
The plan calls for buying vacant, foreclosed properties, rehabbing them to make them energy efficient and more attractive and selling them to middle-income buyers.
Up to 10 percent also can be spent on demolition of blighted properties and a quarter of the grant must go to low-income housing.
The city will have to refine its plan for the grant because it received half of what it requested. A time line for receiving it isn’t known yet.
The strength of the city’s application likely came from its partnerships, Meadows said, including working with nonprofits such as Habitat for Humanity to build the low-income housing along the South Limestone Street corridor.
Wittenberg and the hospital also will offer incentives to employees who buy homes in the targeted areas near those campuses.
“This additional funding helps us build on the synergy that’s already there,” she said.
Mayor Warren Copeland agreed, saying a lot of work went into the application.
Empty, foreclosed homes can drag down property values, he said, and hurt the morale of a neighborhood.
“Everybody in the neighborhood suffers,” Copeland said.
The city will require anyone who purchases a home through the program to take homebuyer education courses.
“We’re focused on putting people in homes that can sustain their homeownership and sustain their homes,” Meadows said.
About the Author