(Source: By Jared Paben, The Bellingham Herald, Wash.) - A Bellingham-based nonprofit can help at least seven additional lower-income households buy homes they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford because it received new state and federal grants.
Kulshan Community Land Trust recently received a total of $462,500 in grants. The money will help at least seven households get into homes, but it’ll likely help eight and maybe nine, land trust Executive Director Dean Fearing said.
The money will help lower-income people afford already existing homes, as well as help the land trust build new energy-efficient homes in the Birchwood neighborhood next year, he said.
“In this time that we’ve seen so much economic downturn, especially in the housing market, it’s good to be getting these funds,” he said. The money stimulates homebuying that benefits not just the homebuyer but the real estate industry and local governments, he said.
The grants provide:
- $100,000 allocated by the city of Bellingham. This funding came to the city from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is limited to homes inside Bellingham. This amount is half of that from previous years, Fearing said, although the good news is the land trust still has funds from this source left over from last year’s allocation.
- $362,500 from the state Department of Commerce’s Housing Trust Fund. The land trust was one of 14 programs across the state to receive funding. This amount was higher than each of the previous two $250,000 disbursements from the state, he said. These funds are particularly important given the decrease in HUD funding, he said.
“We have plenty of homebuyers to service, but the past two grant cycles the result has certainly been less homebuyers,” he said.
The nonprofit bridges the gap between the cost of a home and a loan that a lower-income household can qualify for. It then holds the land in trust so homes remain affordable during future sales.
Roughly half of the new funding will go to helping people buy existing homes and the other half will go to building new homes. The land trust plans to build a total of four homes (two single-family residences each with a mother-in-law suite) as part of its Indiana Street Homes project. It hopes to finish them in 2012, but construction might last into 2013, Fearing said.
A separate nonprofit, Habitat for Humanity, plans to build two new homes on two adjacent lots owned by the land trust, Fearing said.
The land trust currently holds 97 properties in trust, and three or more additional ones are expected to come into the trust by December.
Reach JARED PABEN at jared.paben@bellinghamherald.com or call 715-2289. Read his Traffic Blog at blogs.bellinghamherald.com/traffic.
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Source: By Jared Paben, The Bellingham Herald, Wash.
