From the Director:

I recently received a ray of sunshine via email. Homestead was allocated a $362,500 funding commitment from the Washington State Department of Commerce to help 10 households purchase their first homes through our program. This is particularly welcome news given the constraints on public funding these days and the prospects for further cuts looming like storm clouds on the horizon.

Homestead is committed to making the public and private funding investments in its program go further by remaining flexible and aggressively moving to capture opportunities as they arrive in this unpredictable economy.

We have a growing track record with this approach stretching limited public subsidy to help more families and provide more community benefit. Since 2010, we’ve become 65% more efficient with public funding, allowing us to serve more buyers.

We have several recent examples of this strategy in action. At our Valtera townhomes partnership we worked with Blue Heron LLC to make land donations under 30 new townhomes in West Seattle, reducing the price to our buyers and stretching public subsidy further. This project is 90% sold.

At Wolcott, we stretched our subsidy investment by buying a foreclosed, partially built 15 home development from the FDIC at a discount, and finishing the homes ourselves. The homes are high quality new construction, with 3 and 4 bedrooms, and required less public subsidy to make affordable because of Homestead’s role. Wolcott is now sold out.

In keeping with this strategy, I am delighted to announce that we are launching our Acquisition and Rehab program, where we will acquire homes at a discount from lenders or other sources, fix them up, and translate the savings to our buyers. We will be teaming up with Habitat for Humanity on many of the homes that go through this program, using sweat equity to stretch public investment even further. This is just the latest way that we will add affordable, high quality homes to the land trust, and stretch the public money invested in our program further to serve the greatest number of households in need. In so doing, we keep our rays of sunshine around longer as we head into winter.