Emmet Housing Solutions Fund
Everything starts at home: health, well-being, learning, safety. Yet finding a safe, affordable home remains a significant challenge for many individuals and families in Emmet County. Homes and apartments across price ranges are in short supply, and construction and material costs continue to rise alongside land costs.
In recent years, the Little Traverse Bay Housing Partnership, a collaborative of local individuals and organizations, has taken a look at the various challenges to creating attainable housing. One main challenge for creating new housing is simply the cost of purchasing land and ensuring that it meets environmental and zoning requirements for development. Additional costs may also include legal and engineering fees, designs and site plans, to name only a few.
In order to help overcome some of these barriers to building homes, the Petoskey-Harbor Springs Area Community Foundation established the Emmet Housing Solutions Fund in December 2019 with support from the Frey Foundation. This fund provides a financial resource to address the costs of creating homes, focusing in part on the early development costs. The fund also provides grant support to existing nonprofit organizations and local government agencies who are actively working on housing. The fund makes both grants and loans, and will actively partner with others to leverage additional resources to meet these challenges.
To serve as a true catalyst in addressing the myriad issues limiting safe, affordable homes in Emmet County, we seek to raise funds to purchase and preserve land appropriate for future workforce housing development. With today’s housing market, cost of land continues to climb and, by preserving land specifically for housing, we can lower a major hurdle to housing development in Emmet County. Through the Emmet Housing Solutions Fund, our goal is to raise $500,000 for land acquisition by 2022.
To learn more about the fund, please contact David L. Jones, Executive Director, at djones[at]phsacf.org or call 231-348-5820.