WXXI: Housing Organizations Receive nearly $600K in Grants (2008-07-28)

Congresswoman Louise Slaughter joined Rochester Mayor Robert Duffy and officials from area nonprofits, the Federal Home Loan Bank and M&T Bank, to announce $583,000 in affordable housing funds Monday.

The funds come from the Federal Home Loan Bank, which works like a bank for banks, helping them secure credit to help back mortgages, rather than lending directly to consumers. It gives 10 percent of its earnings in the form of grants like those awarded today, to develop a region's stock of affordable homes.

Mayor Duffy called the grants "seeds for money and housing, that [change] neighborhoods," saying that "if you drive around Rochester and look at the housing projects and developments that have gone up ... looking at what has happened around the area, it is planting a garden. Those seeds go in and all of the sudden it adds beauty to that neighborhood, it adds affordability for people, but then everything else seems to change around it."

The grant recipients include the Marketview Heights Association (MHA), which hosted the event in a space that's set to be the site of a home ownership counseling center and affordable rental housing units. MHA received $73,600 for those units, which will be filled in partnership with Sojourner House, an organization that helps women find transitional housing after leaving an abusive situation, or who are fighting addiction.

Providence Housing Development Corporation received $345,000 for rental housing that will eventually be available for purchase. And the Southeast Area Coalition (SEAC) received $165,000, which it will use to leverage other funds for home improvement grants and assistance for low-income residents of the southeast part of the city.

Helen Hogan is with the SEAC. She says the funds will help keep people in their homes as the mortgage crisis rages.

"In the southeast we've had some very, very good success over the past 20 years in terms of upgrading the neighborhoods and the commercial strips. For us it's important that we keep our low-to-moderate income residents in the area. We really work hard not to gentrify the area, so this allows our homeowners that are existing in the current community to make repairs on their homes."

To be eligible for the grant funds, the projects had to be sponsored by financial organizations that are members of New York's Federal Home Loan Bank. In the case of the organizations granted funds Monday, M&T Bank was the sponsor.