Elgin updates plans to buy, rehab foreclosed homes September 26th, 2009
ELGIN — The Elgin City Council on Wednesday evening revisited fine-tuning plans to buy foreclosed homes with $2.1 million from the federal government’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program.
At a committee of the whole session in late April, Community Development Director Jerry Deering suggested purchasing two or three homes, in various Elgin neighborhoods, that would be sold to income-eligible families. Homes would be chosen based on location, architecture and/or if they could be converted to be in compliance with occupancy requirements.
On Wednesday night, the council discussed the idea of selecting a pool of qualified contractors from whom it would take bids for rehabbing up to 12 purchased homes spread out among the northeast, northwest, southwest and Gifford Park neighborhoods. At any one time, three or four contractors would be working on NSP projects.
Habitat for Humanity of Northern Fox Valley would manage 25 percent of the projects, because the federal requirement is that a quarter of the funding go into homes that would be sold to qualifying low-income families. The city would use NSP funds to buy the homes, and Habitat would use its own funds for rehabbing and financing.
In April, Deering informed the council that less than 3 percent of the Elgin’s housing stock is involved in the various stages of the foreclosure process. On Wednesday evening, Planning Manager Matthew Fitzgibbon told the council that the city currently has 477 properties scheduled for auction and 379 homes owned by lenders. Eighty-two of those homes are in the neighborhoods the city has targeted for the program.
According to information from the Illinois Foreclosure Listing, from 2007 to March 31, 2009, Elgin saw 1,990 newly filed foreclosures, 1,027 scheduled auctions, and 693 real estate-owned foreclosures.
“We’d like to have the first of the homes purchased this fall and winter, so that work could begin in spring,” Fitzgibbon said.
The plan would be to have at least four of the houses being worked on by summer, then proceed to work on another four houses. And work would include affordable restoration as well as equipping the homes with green features including tankless water heaters.
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