Celebrate, Celebrate-Dance to the Mu....!!

In spite of the many roadblocks New Albany Community Housing held its final Board Meeting of 2007 this past Monday evening and opened a bottle of bubbly to celebrate a successful year!

Celebrate you say? When all I see is a bunch of empty houses sitting on stilts surrounded by mounds of mud? What’s to celebrate?

Ahh!! You apparently haven’t been by of late! All but one of the houses in the Meadow is now in place on their foundations, the street is paved, the lots surrounding them have been leveled and grass seed has been sown!

In addition, two of the Linden Meadows homes as well as the New Home we built on the corner of 8th & Oak Streets have buyers whose credit has been approved and are scheduled to close before the end of the year!

On the human interest side, one of the prospective buyers is a single parent of four who was for all intents and purposes homeless. The five of them have been living in a two bedroom mobile home. She attempted to buy last once before but the company she worked for closed its doors and she had to start over to meet the credit/work history requirements. The same company reopened under new management, rehired her at her previous position plus gave her an increase in salary. Since then he has met all of the criteria for qualifying to this program and is looking forward to being not only a homeowner but a part of a community. We all wish her well.

Finally, the staff recently moved their office into one of the houses in the Meadow which puts them onsite to more closely monitor the ongoing refurbishment of the project, show the homes to prospective buyers, gives them room to expand staff and a place to hold first time home owner education classes for said buyers. Plus having occupants should go a long way to cut down on vandalism and we don’t have to pay rent on the facility!

The obvious downside here is this house may be the next one to sell. But what the hey? We have 20+ more to move into and out of when necessary!

Oh! I almost forgot that we have a new addition to our staff. Pat Woosley is now our Housing Services Manager. She will be in charge of the education classes and much of the paperwork involved in the sales side of things which will free John up to concentrate more on acquisitions and construction issues.

After closings all of this adds up to matching funds to buy more homes for renovation or more lots to build new homes both of which equate to an increase in the numbers on home owning taxpayers which leads directly into improved neighborhoods in our fair city.

What’s not to celebrate?? A toast to all of those who have worked so hard to make this a reality and looking forward to much more of the same in 2008.