Friday, September 23, 2005

Affordable Housing- Co-ops

For all who are interested yesterday there was an article in the Post about Sursum Corda and the plans for the area to save it from foreclosure and rebuild mixed income residences. The resident's will get $50K (per household) which they can use to purchase units, or whatever, and they also will have the right to rent there. This does bring up some other questions, but since I'm not a resident of that complex or area, I'm not going to ask them.
Sursum Corda is a bit odd, it is a cooperative, as is Truxton Circle's Northwest Cooperative that sits in the 200 block of Q and R Streets. I'm going to take an educated guess here and say that if it is a co-op then there are people who "own" shares in the apartment complex and "rent" their unit. They are a condo alternative and there are tons of them in New York City, a few here in the District. Once I tried renting a unit in a SW co-op, the people sub-leasing the unit were fine with me, but I made too little money for the co-op board and they said no. But I digress. I'm a bit confused though of how it all works with HUD funds and Section 8 vouchers. Can you be a co-op shareholder and a Section 8 recipient? Is everyone living in the co-op owners of the co-op? I don't know. Probably would help if I asked somebody.
Like Sursum Corda, the Northwest Cooperative in Truxton (there is another NW Co-op on 400 block O & N) is affordable housing. And as far as non-market rate complexes go, it seems to be fairly maintained. If the walk though during the Flower Power walk proved anything, some residents there do try to make their area nice. Investing a little fertilizer and a little water here and there does go a long way.

2 Comments:

At 9/23/2005 5:04 PM, Anonymous Sweth said...

Section 8 is technically gone, replaced by HUD's Housing Choice Vouchers program; under that program, people who are getting rental vouchers can (after jumping through some hoops and meeting some eligibility requirements) get homeownership vouchers instead (assuming that the local housing authority supports the homeownership vouchers, which I believe is true in DC).

 
At 9/23/2005 9:20 PM, Blogger rollins said...

Yes, it is run through the District of Columbia Housing Authority

But it is a good question, who owns the units in Sursum Corda now - I don't think it is the standard coop.

 

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