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The renovated Mayfield homes off Airport Avenue have new flooring, windows and appliances. The Coalition purchased the 50-year-old houses for $2.9 million and will sell them to local residents who are unable to afford high area real estate costs.
The CVHC is spending between $13,000 and $15,000 per house to renovate homes in Mayfield. |
By EMILY BATTLE
Twenty-five houses on the edge of Fredericksburg's Mayfield neighborhood could help provide something that can be hard to find for many who work in the city--the opportunity to own a home.
Last summer, the Central Virginia Housing Coalition bought these homes, roughly 50-year-old brick houses off Airport Avenue.
They have been rental properties for decades and, as leases expire and tenants move out, the CVHC is rehabbing the homes, spending between $13,000 and $15,000 per house to replace windows and roofs and add air conditioning.
The group will then use a combination of state money and federal money funneled through the city to provide affordable financing, along with help toward down payments and closing costs, to sell the homes to people who would not normally be able to own homes in Fredericksburg's high-priced real estate market.
The CVHC plans to sell them at about $150,000 apiece. According to the Virginia Association of Realtors, the average home sale price in the Fredericksburg metro area in January was $354,271.
"It's going to create homeownership, where people who were unable to own a home before are able to own a home in the city of Fredericksburg," said CVHC Executive Director Gary Parker. "I don't know of any other area in the city that has something to compare to what we have in Mayfield."
The money to buy the homes came from the CVHC's sale last fall of 17.5 acres it owned off Fall Hill Avenue to K. Hovnanian Homes, Parker said.
With that $2.6 million, along with a loan from the National Bank of Fredericksburg, the coalition bought the homes, which are spread along Duke Street, South Street and Howard Avenue, for $2.9 million from a partnership registered to local businessman Lewis Graves.
Finding opportunities like this in the city hasn't been easy for the CVHC. The money that will provide affordable loans for those who buy these homes comes from a state program called Supporting Partnerships and Revitalizing Communities, or SPARC, run by the Virginia Housing Development Authority.
It's the third time the CVHC has been allocated loan funds from the competitive statewide program, but the first time the group has been able to use those funds to create homeowners within the city limits.
In 2004, the group was awarded $765,000, which it used to provide loans for home buyers in King George, Spotsylvania and Stafford counties.
In 2005, the group was granted $2.1 million in SPARC loan money. Using the money was dependent on the group securing land in Fredericksburg, though, and when the CVHC couldn't do that, it had to give the money back to the state.
This year, the CVHC has been awarded $1.3 million in SPARC funds, and it plans to use this to provide loans for 10 buyers. It will use other state money to provide five more loans. The remaining 10 houses will remain rentals for the immediate future.
To help with closing costs, the city is kicking in some of the Community Development Block Grant money it gets from the federal government.
Although the city's overall CDBG allocation from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has gone down this year to $237,854, compared with around $250,000 in years past, the city's Housing Advisory Committee has proposed setting aside 43 percent more of that money for direct homeownership assistance.
Erik Nelson, the city's senior planner, said the decision to raise the amount of money set aside for homeownership assistance from $28,000 to $40,000 was based in part on the availability of the CVHC's homes.
"This is something where we can have an impact immediately," he said.
Nelson also said that according to Census Bureau statistics, more than half of city households qualify for the city's homeownership assistance, which helps with down payments and closing costs.
To meet that threshold, a household must be at or below 80 percent of the area's median household income. In Fredericksburg, 57 percent of households meet that criterion.
The Census Bureau estimated the median household income for Fredericksburg in 2003 at $36,499.
Mary Anne Bryant, the CVHC's deputy director, said the group closed on its first sale of one of the Mayfield homes last week. It has three more potential home buyers ready for contracts.
To reach EMILY BATTLE:
Email: ebattle@freelancestar.com
