Employers can help employees purchase, rent new homes created by NSP Chicago
To increase the pace of homes in Chicago exiting foreclosure and help stabilize neighborhoods, MPC is encouraging Chicago employers to start and/or link employer-assisted housing programs to the City of Chicago’s foreclosure revitalization strategy and affordable housing resources.
Foreclosures have devastated many Chicago neighborhoods by creating vacant and blighted parcels that drag down overall property values. The City is responding through a targeted redevelopment strategy funded by the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), which was created in 2008 to tackle foreclosures and abandonments across the country. Chicago received $55 million in the first funding round of NSP, $98 million in the second round, and an additional $15.9 million in September 2010, for a total of $168.9 million. With this funding, the city is purchasing and rehabbing homes in specific Chicago neighborhoods, with the goal of revitalizing whole neighborhoods, rather than taking a parcel-by-parcel approach. At the same time, the homes renovated or built by the city and its development partner, Mercy Portfolio Services, are high-quality, energy-efficient homes affordable to a variety of types of homebuyers.
As the City of Chicago and Mercy Portfolio Services work to acquire, rehab and resell these homes, Chicago employers can contribute to this city redevelopment strategy and help their workers take advantage of attractive and affordable homeownership opportunities through employer-assisted housing.
- Employers who are unfamiliar with EAH – which is basically any way an employer helps an employee with the cost of homeownership, typically through downpayment assistance – can contact MPC’s Samantha DeKoven for more information.
- Employers currently offering EAH programs can target their programs to assist qualified employees with purchasing new units coming on line through the city’s NSP program. Just call your REACH partner, the nonprofit that provides homebuyer education to your employees as part of the EAH program, or ask MPC to facilitate this for you. This map shows the neighborhoods where homes are being rehabbed through Chicago’s NSP program. This web site includes photos and additional information about new homes now available as a result of Chicago’s NSP program. Rental opportunities are also available, and employers can help their employees rent as well as buy through an EAH rental program which MPC can help you design.