About the Community Housing Fund

The Community Housing Fund serves as a catalyst to secure new sources of capital to leverage community financing of the construction and rehabilitation of housing affordable to working families, people with unmet needs and those living on limited and fixed incomes in Washington County.

How the Fund Leverages Financing for Affordable Housing

• Increasing housing choices for those with low incomes by offering loans, grants and technical assistance to nonprofit community development corporation partners to finance pre-development.
• Putting a face on the affordable housing issue by hosting community workshops and sharing the stories of those who need housng.
• Conducting a broad-based fund raising campaign across the public and private sectors to identify and secure equity and debt investments to capitalize the Fund and build a community asset for Washington County.
• Bringing people and organizations together to create solutions.

In 2002, more than 3,000 residents of Washington County took part in issues' teams that focused on the basic needs of the Washington County. The teams included education, health care, mental health, the environment and housing. Each issue had a facilitated group which met for six months and crafted a set of implementation steps to improve the ability of the county and its community partners to respond to the identified needs.

The housing issue team determined that the single most important tool to increase affordable housing production was the creation of new financial resources. Specifically, nonprofit developers of affordable housing cited the need for the early pre-development money to pay for the early costs of renovation or construction. These include such necessary tasks as soil analysis, architectural drawings, permit fees, land surveying and other tasks which must be completed before the developers may seek funding from sources such as government and banks. We also provide flexible funding to fill the gaps in existing projects.

In response to this need for early funding, the Community Housing Fund was founded in 2003 as a 503(c)3 nonprofit corporation. The Fund's mission is to become a long-term asset for Washington County. The Fund increases the number of affordable housing units available to low-income residents of the county by providing early pre-development money to nonprofit developers who are renovating or building affordable housing communities.

Over $1 million has been raised since the Fund's inception. Since the Fund's first grant in 2004, both grants and loans have helped six nonprofit groups create or rehabilitate over 400 units of housing. These grants and loans have leveraged, on average, seven to eight times the investments made by the Fund.

The Fund is grateful to its Board of Directors, volunteers who oversee the operations of the Fund and provide strategic direction. The staff of two is committed to the mission of the Fund and pursues working relationships with all sectors of the community to secure new sources of loan capital and promote innovative housing models and tools with local policymakers.

Our funding partners have joined with us in our mission to raise awareness of affordable housing needs and to make significant investments in solutions to these community needs.

Contact the staff of the Community Housing Fund: info@thecommunityhousingfund.org