Table of Content
Those who previously qualified for the Detroit Tax Relief Fund in 2022 will also be eligible for the Detroit home repair fund. Part of the campaign is to make sure homes within the city thrive and not end up condemned like so many others. Approved applicants of the new program are slated to be notified by Feb. 1, 2022, and repairs are expected to begin in the spring of that year and completed within two years. Regardless of income, homeowners in HUD designated areas in each city council district can still apply.See the map.
Lifelong resident Samela Dean is a senior, disabled and qualifies for a property tax exemption for low-income residents, which made her a prime candidate for the city’s Renew Detroit Home Repair Program. The $45 million effort intends to help 2,000 low-income Detroiters fix up their homes over the next four years. A second phase of the program opened in October – and will include window replacements. Detroiters must submit their property tax exemption applications by Nov. 12 and must be approved by Dec. 14 to be eligible for the repair program. The roof repairs are expected to cost $20 million, with each project estimated to cost between $7,000 and $13,000.
Detroit news, founded by Detroiters
Dean was one of the first Detroiters to receive a new roof at no cost through Renew Detroit, a program funded with a portion of Detroit’s federal American Rescue Plan Act pandemic aid. If not for the program, Dean said she wouldn’t have been able to save enough money to replace the leaky roof. In the newest phase of the repair program, new window replacement is available to further assist home owners, said Joy. The new funding will be used for windows and roof replacement in the next three years. "This grant program will be transformative for homeowners residing within the city of Detroit. They will be able to make much-needed repairs to roofs, or windows that they otherwise may not be able to afford," Joy said.
“You have years where people had to pay over assessed property taxes that we illegally assessed on their property instead of keeping up with their homes,” Ford said. “Then you also had a climate event last year when our basements flooded and we had people that have new furnaces that they bought and paid for that they couldn’t use. Donna Givens-Davidson, president and CEO of the Eastside Community Network, said the failure of banks to lend in communities with low property values is essentially a modern form of red-lining. Black Detroiters have not had the same opportunities to purchase affordable homes, Givens-Davidson said, and discrimination in both housing and employment leaves them with reduced income with which to make repairs.
New Detroit home repair program can fix 1,000 roofs. Nearly 5,000 Detroiters applied
These meetings allowed the participating Detroiters the opportunity to voice their preferences on how to spend the ARPA funds. Mayor Duggan began an extensive community feedback process to discuss how the American Rescue Plan Act funds allocated to the City of Detroit could be utilized. Throughout May and June 2021, 65 community meetings were hosted that included close to 4,000 participants. They help people experiencing homelessness, addiction, and more -- even giving away cars and homes. "This is a program that we decided we wanted to do for people who are over 90 years old," Chad Audi said. Miss Evelyn is 96 years old and still lives in the same Detroit home she shared for decades with her family.
The program is currently going through phase one of assessing and approving 1,100 homes for roof replacement, which are expected to begin in September. Josh Elling, CEO of Jefferson East Inc., said he's happy to see the city directing money toward the issue of home repairs and commended the design of the program. Daisy Jackson, vice president of the Field Street Block Club in Detroit's Islandview neighborhood, said that $30 million is not nearly enough to address the need for home repairs and that it shouldn't be restricted to seniors and those with disabilities.
Benefits will start as early as June
Renew Detroit is a free home-repair program for eligible Detroiters who are 62 or older, disabled and haven't received a grant in the last 10 years, said chief of special housing programs Heather Zygmontowicz. DetroitA home-repair program from the City of Detroit has received a $15 million grant this summer to help replace roofs and windows in more than 2,000 homes in Detroit by 2024. The city of Detroit earlier this month announced a program to replace 1,000 roofs next year for low-income seniors and homeowners with disabilities. The $30 million program, dubbed Renew Detroit, is the firstinitiative to come out of more than $400 million in federal COVID-19 recovery dollars the city received. More than 4,800 Detroiters have applied for a new roof repair program that can accommodate 1,000 homes, demonstrating the vast need for home repairs across the city. Samela Dean, left, and her neighbors talk with city officials about opportunities to receive financial aid to repair their aging homes on Detroit’s northeast side.
Jackson's block club set up an online fundraiser to raise money for home repairs, which already helped one neighbor with their roof, she said. At this time, it's unclear how many applicants meet the three initial criteria, Zygmontowicz said. However, approximately 40% of people are reporting that they have already been approved for the property tax exemption or have applied. As of midday Monday, 4,848 people applied to the city's repair program, which receives a couple hundred applications a day on average.
Community Partner Resources
The city is working with community development organizations to find other solutions. The Gilbert Foundation also launched a $20 million Detroit Home Repair Fund this spring for 1,000 low-income homeowners over the next three years. That fund helps homeowners identified through DTE’s Energy Efficiency Assistance Program who are at 200% of the federal poverty line and applied for a property tax exemption through the City of Detroit.
Dean said she was scammed by a local repairman who took a deposit for the work and then ran off and, in a separate financial challenge, Dean said her federal stimulus check was stolen. A DMC construction crew hired by the City of Detroit replaces the roof of a homeowner who qualified for the Renew Detroit Home Repair program on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022. Victor Williams joined Local 4 News in October of 2019 after working for WOIO in Cleveland, OH, WLOX News in Biloxi, MS, and WBBJ in Jackson, TN. Victor developed a love for journalism after realizing he was a great speaker and writer at an early age. Take this short survey to find out if you have any health or safety risks in your home and learn how to fix them. There were more than 24,000 moderately or severely inadequate homes in Detroit,according to the 2020 University of Michigan study, which analyzed 2017 American Housing Survey data. These could be homes with broken toilets, no working cooking equipment, rats in the unit and exposed wiring and water leaks.
Are you concerned your home may have some health hazards that are impacting the quality of life of your family and/or those who visit your home? If so, Green & Healthy Homes Initiative Detroit-Wayne County has developed a free, secure, and confidential surveyto help identify health hazards and the resources to help remove them. Nushrat Rahman covers issues related to economic mobility for the Detroit Free Press and Bridge Detroitas a corps member with Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project. The city is looking to hire Detroit-based contractors to perform the repairs, Duggan said.
Grannemann said seeing the calls come in triggered “an emotional realization” of how many residents have needed support and were not getting it. “We have quite a few low-income people and seniors who could have normally kept up with their houses and did – now they cannot,” she said. Taylor needs to replace the deteriorating siding, gutters, roof and windows on her home. She said some contractors refuse to perform work in the Hope Village neighborhood where she lives, and the damage to her house has made it impossible to secure home insurance.
No comments:
Post a Comment