For the first time in 20 years, Wayne County will not receive funds from the Community Housing Improvement Program

Maddi O’Neill

News Editor

Wayne County and the City of Wooster have lost their bid for the Community Housing Improvement Program (CHIP) grant for the first time since 1994. The CHIP grant, which allows the Wayne Metropolitan Housing Authority to offer assistance to low-income homeowners, is federally funded and allocated by the Ohio Department of Development Services.

The Wayne County CHIP office is usually in charge of allocating the grant money into several community assistance programs, including down payment assistance, home repairs, home and rental property rehabilitation and septic system replacement. These programs will continue to be available to low-income households for another few months but will eventually be halted as previous grant money runs out and no new grant money comes in to replace it.

Stan Popp, Executive Director of the Wayne Metropolitan Housing Authority, explained that Wayne County and the City of Wooster lost the grant this year because of adjustments in the grant application grading system. “The Ohio Department of Development Services receives and scores applications based on statewide criteria,” he said. “[This year]…they put more emphasis on distressed communities. We just don’t have the numbers.”

Popp believes that there is still a need for the CHIP grant in Wayne County. The county may not have the numbers to compete with more distressed areas for the CHIP grant, he explained, but there is still significant need for homeowner assistance.

“We know the neighborhoods that still need assistance,” Popp said. “There’s a lot of aging, over-occupied housing stock out there where folks have aged in the properties and they don’t have the ability to make repairs to their home.”  One of the primary goals of the CHIP grant is to aid the elderly and disabled with home repairs that they cannot afford on their own. If, for example, an elderly, low-income individual’s furnace stops working in the middle of winter, CHIP grant funds would go toward providing an emergency replacement.

The federal funding for the CHIP grant comes from two sources: Community Development Block Grants and Home Investment Program Funds, both of which are specifically allocated to assist state and local governments with improving communities by providing home rehabilitation and affordable home repairs. This year, however, federal grant money was limited as a result of sequestration, which cut Community Development Block Grants in Ohio by an estimated $11 million and Home funds by an additional $3 million according to bipartisanpolicycenter.org and the National League of Cities (nlc.org).

Popp worried that the loss of the CHIP grant will undo some of the community rehabilitation that has come from that money over the past 20 years.

“Over a period of years, we have had huge impact in residential neighborhoods across the county,” he said. “There are hundreds of units of housing that we have rehabbed since we’ve been doing this program.”

Because of the loss of the CHIP grant, the Wayne County CHIP office is expected to close in the next few months, and the services that the Wayne Metropolitan Housing Authority has been able to offer to low-income households will end soon.