During Monday’s Housing Committee meeting, a new strategy for the Housing Rehabilitation Project was discussed. P-J photo by Sara Holthouse

The Department of Development may be changing their strategy a little bit when it comes to nine houses involved in a city housing rehabilitation project.

Crystal Surdyk, city development director, told Housing Committee members the long term goal is to get the nine houses homeowner occupied. All of the houses are in neighborhoods considered at a tipping point and that the houses were thought to be good candidates to help stabilize the neighborhood.

“The idea was to have the potential buyers do the renovations, and that could be through a number of different ways,” Surdyk said. “They could qualify for funding through the city or another home agency that we work with, all kinds of different ways. What we are finding is that this is challenging and we don’t want to set up new homeowners for failure.”

Additionally, Surdyk said they have talked with other housing agency partners, and that there is a grant from the EPA that the premise is to retrofit properties according to what the state’s Fire Protection Act requirements are going to be to convert these houses to all electric energy. In the meantime, she said there are a number of things the grant will pay for in order to make that happen.

“And the reason we applied for that grant is we know that this is coming and we wanted to get a baseline of what it will cost a homeowner to convert and retrofit their houses to meet these guidelines,” Surdyk said. “So, we have these candidates and what we decided and talked about with the EPA — and we did actually include this as a potential option in that grant application — was in order to one, make these houses a little more pliable for a new homebuyer and two, to also accomplish the goal of retrofitting the properties so we can establish our baseline and fit the requirements of the EPA grant, that we would use these properties as our model, essentially.”

There are a few individuals that Surdyk said are looking at two of the properties very seriously and putting together proposals, and that contracts from the EPA have been received. Work will begin on the other properties in the very near future.

“In the meantime we had them essentially basically stabilized, secured, all new lock sets put on, windows secured, exterior cleanup, interior cleanouts and buttoned up the best we could within reason,” Surdyk said.

Additionally, it was noted that when the properties were chosen for the project, the neighborhoods were looked at and the houses were identified because of being located in neighborhoods that had the ability to transition one way or another, so this project is an intervention meant to help stabilize those specific neighborhoods. The grant program, which is around $1 million, is set to subsidize a significant amount of the renovation costs needed as well.

The overall purpose of turning these houses to electric is to have the ability to demonstrate how much turning houses to electric will cost in the city, and to give local homeowners more data as well.

“We wrote the grant knowing this was the direction that the state was going and so when we applied for this EPA grant the intent was, let’s use federal funding if we’re successful, which we were, to bring a number of houses up to the standard that the state is requiring, and let’s see what is it going to cost us?” Surdyk said. “How is this transition going to work? And that’s part of the reason the BPU is a partner, because they want to collect that data as well. So as the state moves forward with their requirements we will then have real time information that we can give back to them.”

Surdyk noted that the information that will be able to be gleaned from this project will help the city to make better decisions in the future, and if there is pushback to give to the state the project will provide data to allow them to communicate what needs to be communicated.