Marin supervisors earmark federal funds for housing, services
Marin County expects to receive $5.3 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2021-22 to help fund housing and services for low-income households, particularly for non-White residents.
That is about twice the amount the county received last year. The county had been expecting to get just under $2.4 million.
The HUD money is allocated through its Community Development Block Grant program (CDBG) and its HOME Investment Partnerships Program. This month supervisors approved spending $2.1 million to support 25 local CDBG projects and $981,109 for two HOME projects.
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, signed by President Biden on March 11, allocated $1.9 trillion for further pandemic-related relief. Marin County planner Molly Kron said the county will seek new applications before asking supervisors to allocate the additional American Rescue funding.
Leelee Thomas, a county planning manager, said the HUD programs provide services and housing to low-income households with a focus on “protected classes” under fair housing laws.
“Assuring access for people of color, for disabled individuals and families with children is a critical part of this program,” Thomas said.
A protected class is a group of people who qualify for certain special protection under a law or policy. Federal protected classes involve race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender, disabilities and people older than 40.
Kron said the HOME program is designed to increase the amount of affordable housing for low- and very-low-income households while the CDBG program funds services for low- and moderate-income people as well as affordable housing.
The two largest allocations of HUD money went to ambitious housing projects in San Rafael and Novato.
Homeward Bound of Marin, a nonprofit that operates all of Marin’s homeless shelters, will receive more than $526,000 for a project designed to build 50 apartments for extremely-low-income and very-low-income tenants adjacent to its New Beginnings site in Novato.
Twenty-four of the apartments are to be reserved for veterans and 26 for formerly homeless people entering the job market. The project also includes a commercial kitchen that will be used to provide job training to tenants and rented for events.
The first phase of the project, the veterans’ apartments, is estimated to cost $10 million. The price tag for the entire project is $25.4 million. So far, Homeward Bound has raised approximately $8.5 million, so it still needs another $1.5 million to begin phase one.
Mary Kay Sweeney, Homeward Bound’s executive director, said that “lining up all of the funding sources is a multi-year endeavor.” She said the end of next year is the earliest that construction could begin.
The supervisors also allocated $500,000 in HUD funds to Eden Housing to create 67 apartments for seniors in a new building in San Rafael. Vivalon, formerly known as Whistlestop, a nonprofit serving older adults, selected Hayward-based Eden Housing as its general partner for the project, which will also include an integrated health services center in the building.
The total project is estimated to cost $51 million, but the housing portion, which the HUD money will help fund, will amount to $44.7 million.
Daniela Ogden, a spokeswoman for Eden Housing, said that with the HUD allocation, the nonprofit now has all of its funding locked in.
“That was the last piece,” Ogden said. Construction is expected to begin next spring.
Other sizable allocations included $231,000 to the Marin Housing Authority to help fund a residential rehabilitation loan program; more than $148,000 to the Redwoods senior residential complex in Mill Valley for revitalization of low-income units there; and $125,000 to the Marin City Community Services District for a Manzanita Center facility master plan.