New York, NY – New $20 Million Stimulus Funding to Help New Yorkers Buy Foreclosed Homes

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    for5New York, NY – Home buyers may be given up to $50,000 toward buying a foreclosed home in New York, thanks to a federal fund that has been awarded to the city’s housing agency, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

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    The city agency is being given more than $20 million from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, which was created by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to help save and restore areas worst hit by the foreclosure crisis and pockmarked with blighted, empty homes.

    To be eligible for the fund, a buyer’s household must earn less than the 120 percent of the neighborhood’s median income, according to Arden Sokolow, the housing agency’s director of Distressed Asset Finance. Buyers are also eligible for up to $30,000 to rehabilitate the site, she said.

    The homes the agency hopes to rehabilitate and fill with people are across 95 census tracts, Ms. Sokolow said, but concentrated in areas hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis, like Jamaica, Queens, and in the Brooklyn communities of East Flatbush and Bushwick. Median incomes in these neighborhoods tend to be less than $50,000.

    The agency had applied for about $50 million from the program, and has yet to decide how to allocate the amount it ended up getting. Ms. Sokolow said much of the federal funds would go toward helping people buy foreclosed homes as well foreclosed mixed-use properties, like abandoned storefronts with apartments on top. A portion of the fund will go toward completing construction on stalled buildings through loans, in exchange for developers agreeing to offer more affordable rents.

    The housing agency received money from the federal program once before: it was awarded $24 million last year, which, Ms. Sokolow said, is also being put toward rehabilitating abandoned homes and constructing new ones in foreclosure-ridden neighborhoods, also in Brooklyn and Queens.

    The federal housing agency also awarded $10.5 million to Habitat for Humanity New York, which plans to acquire, repair and construct new homes in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Ocean Hill. Another affordable-housing agency, Community Builders, was awarded $5.5 million.


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    4 Comments
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    It's Catch 22
    It's Catch 22
    14 years ago

    If someone is in the poverty level, low enough income to be eligible for the 50,000 grant, he is certainly not eligible for a Mortgage on a typical home in these areas which are typically $500,00 at least. No Bank is going to give a Mortgage to anyone so poor and even if the bank did he could not afford to pay the Mortgage.

    Use Your Head
    Use Your Head
    14 years ago

    This is like trying to get out of a hole by digging deeper! Where are the brains?!

    A Husband
    A Husband
    14 years ago

    Gezuntheit.
    These are different from the Health care clowns. The grant has been given to NYC, and will be administered by the City. And it’s Mrs., not Ms., BTW. 🙂