(Source: Kasey Husk Herald-Times, Bloomington, Ind. (MCT) — A Bloomington program designed to help homeowners, renters and prospective home buyers is getting some extra assistance of its own.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has granted the city of Bloomington $17,366 to help fund its housing counseling programs, which offer aid to people who are planning to buy or rent a home, are seeking a reverse mortgage or are delinquent on their home loan. The funding is less than half of what the city received last year for the programming, but a welcome award considering funding for the housing counseling had, until January, been cut off entirely.
The federal department granted a total of $286,930 in housing counseling grants to Bloomington and 13 other organizations in Indiana. The funds mean "Indiana households will have a greater opportunity to find housing or keep their current homes," according to a HUD press release.
Bloomington's grant money will be used to support its existing programs, which includes a class for first-time home buyers offered three times a year, according to Doris Sims, assistant director of Bloomington's Housing and Neighborhood Development Department. Students in the 14-hour, two-day class, which is offered at no cost, learn about the process of budgeting, choosing a home, getting a mortgage and maintaining the home after purchase, she said.
The upcoming class on April 14 and 21 is already filled, but it will also be offered July 14 and 21 and Sept. 8 and 15, Sims said.
The city also offers one-on-one counseling to prospective home buyers, as well as default delinquency counseling for those people who are behind on their mortgage payments and at risk of losing their homes. City officials "work with the homeowner and the lending institution to find a workable situation so they can remain in their home," Sims said, possibly through loan modification or repayment.
Other programs offered are counseling to senior citizens considering obtaining a reverse mortgage, and rental counseling that advises prospective renters how to pick a neighborhood, how to budget for expenses and what to look for in a lease, Sims said.
The city has offered housing counseling since 1975, Sims said. However, it reduced the scope of its programming — cutting one counseling staff member and covering just Monroe County instead of the five counties it used to serve — after it learned last year that the federal government had eliminated the program completely.
In January, the program was reinstated on a smaller scale and the city applied for $38,300, similar to the $37,000 or so it received the previous year, Sims said. The $38,300 would have covered about 40 percent of the cost of the program, but the $17,366 grant will cover an even smaller piece of it.
Anyone interested in signing up for the first-time home buyer class or for one-on-one counseling is urged to contact HAND at 349-3401.
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©2012 the Herald-Times (Bloomington, Ind.)
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Distributed by MCT Information Services
Source: Kasey Husk Herald-Times, Bloomington, Ind. (MCT)
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