Rental rehab changes lead to fewer projects

The loss of a program manager and a focus on larger projects has led to less rental rehabilitation activity in the City of Cincinnati.

The City's Rental Rehabilitation Program (RRP) was implemented to increase the number of affordable rental units in the City and to provide incentives for landlords to improve and maintain their current units, thereby reducing blight.

The RRP program manager resigned earlier this year, leaving existing staff in the Department of Community Development and Planning's Housing Division to carry a heavier workload.

Since then, additional employees have been added to the underwriting and review staff and the monitoring of projects has been shipped off to a different department.

Also, in an effort to create a greater neighborhood impact and to keep smaller buildings available for single-family homeownership creation, the City over the past year has been trying to fund only larger projects of 10 units or more, sending owners of smaller buildings to the Hamilton County Housing Improvement Program for funding.

Several lesser factors have also led to the drop in activity. Not only have market conditions made project financing more difficult, but City Council, which must authorize RRP spending, has begun requiring a letter from the project neighborhood's community council stating their awareness of the project and its means of financing.

The program, which is paid for through federal HOME funds, provides forgiveable loans to developers in the amounts of $5,000 per one-bedroom unit, $8,000 per two-bedroom unit, and $13,000 per three-plus-bedroom unit.

Applications for some very large projects of 100 or more units are in the pipeline for early 2008.