City to receive $6.1M to fight foreclosures, improve neighborhoods
Springfield News-Sun – SPRINGFIELD — The city of Springfield will receive more than $6.1 million in federal stimulus money to fight the effect of foreclosures and improve neighborhoods.
Community Development Director Shannon Meadows said the Neighborhood Stabilization Program II grant dollars will be a positive gain for neighborhoods.
“It’s an opportunity we would never have realized otherwise,” she said Thursday, Jan. 14.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development secretary and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown announced the competitive grant awards Thursday in Columbus.
The city’s application focused on a rehab program in two neighborhoods — one east of Wittenberg University and the other west of the downtown hospital.
The plan calls for buying vacant, foreclosed properties, rehabbing them to make them energy efficient and more attractive and selling them to middle-income buyers.
Up to 10 percent also can be spent on demolition of blighted properties and a quarter of the grant must go to low-income housing.
The city will have to refine its plan for the grant because it received half of what it requested. A time line for receiving it isn’t known yet.
