Community Housing Fund: Advocating for Housing

The Community Housing Fund is a catalyst in promoting the search for more resources for affordable housing. The Fund accomplishes this through raising capital and by directly assisting partners in the non-profit development community. To that end, the Fund is an active member of the Housing Advocacy Group (HAG), an association of non-profit housing providers and their colleagues in the financing and social service communities. The HAG's goal it is to urge local governments to budget more dollars for housing development and to adopt zoning tools and financial incentives to encourage more housing production. The HAG currently is focused on urging Washington County to establish an annual, sustained general fund allocation of dollars for affordable housing in the 2008-2009 budget cycle.

On a regional level, the Fund is working in cooperation with Metro to create a $10 million regional revolving loan fund to assist non-profit developers in acquiring land (ever more expensive) and existing apartment buildings with affordable rents that are at risk of being sold by their current owners, leading to rent hikes. Acquiring and renovating existing buildings costs less than new construction, and our community needs to preserve the units we have.

In Salem, the Fund is part of the Housing Alliance, a broad-based statewide coalition of non-profits, tenants, service organizations, and local governments focused on asking the state to provide expanded resources for its existing programs currently used to finance affordable housing. Identifying a combination of funding sources, (e.g. lottery dollars and an increase in real estate document recording fees collected by the counties), the Alliance will be approaching the 2009 legislative session in search of added appropriations that will be distributed statewide, including in Washington County.