Columbus City Council Monday evening approved forgiving nearly 600 emergency home-repair loans that were given to residents to fix hot-water tanks, furnaces, roofs and foundations by removing liens on the properties, with a few conditions.
The loans total $7.6 million, putting the average loan at $12,860. All of the 591 loans are more than a decade old, and the requirements for them to be forgiven include that the homeowners involved with the loan still own the property, and haven’t declared bankruptcy or been foreclosed on.
Homeowners weren’t required to repay the zero-interest loans for property repairs until they sold the properties, at which point the entire principal was due. The idea was that so long as homeowners lived there, they didn’t owe anything.
made housing affordability one of the themes of his reelection campaign.
“The Columbus Housing Strategy is about more than simply building more affordable housing. It’s also about preserving affordability by protecting our neighbors from being displaced,” Ginter said in a prepared release issued as the press conference was going on.
Ginther’s sole opponent in the Columbus mayoral race, Joe Motil, called the forgiveness initiative “a good gesture.”
“But again, we need to concentrate on building affordable housing,” Motil said, calling on the city to take up his plan to use tens of millions of dollars in leftover federal COVID-relief funds to build low-cost apartments, and not the “market rate, tax-abated luxury units” getting built.
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Source: dispatch.com