The beginning of July brings a new fiscal year and more funding for affordable housing in Chapel Hill.

Each fiscal year, the Town of Chapel Hill provides $688,000 from the Affordable Housing Development Reserve. With this year being the fourth funding cycle, the Chapel Hill Housing and Community Planner Sarah Viñas said they expect more applications than they have funds.

“We’ve had applications from agencies every cycle and, in fact, the last funding cycle, the amount requested from these agencies exceeded the funds available in the reserve. So there’s tremendous need in the community, even more so than what is available through this funding source,” Viñas said.

The application process for these projects follows certain guidelines based on the priority project areas.

“There are four of them: Land banking and land acquisition, rental subsidy and development, home ownership development and future development planning. The reserve funding is dedicated to funding applications that meet one of those priority project areas,” Viñas said. “The town’s housing advisory board is involved in reviewing applications that are submitted and scoring and evaluating them. It’s a pretty rigorous process that applications go through, and I think that has helped us stay focused and to really fund quality projects.”

There has been a variety of projects that have been approved with the council. Viñas said they expect to have a variety of asking prices on funding these projects.

“There is no minimum or maximum threshold for applications. We’ve had applications for as little as $10,000 to as much as $400,000, so there is a real range. Affordable housing is expensive so we expect some high price-tag project proposals,” Viñas said.

Projects that have been funded in the past have covered home purchase and rental options and have been distributed to large organizations like Habitat for Humanity and local non-profits like EmPowerment Inc.

Applications will be accepted through August 29 at 2 pm. To view specific details on the Affordable Housing Reserve and the application process you can visit the Town of Chapel Hill’s website. If you have any specific details you can email Sarah Viñas at svinas@townofchapelhill.org.

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