Pawtucket Central Falls nonprofit plans post-house-purchase workshops
The program will also pay for efficiency upgrades
PAWTUCKET – The Pawtucket Central Falls Development is planning to ramp up its new and current homeowner education programs after being the only organization in Rhode Island to receive a $200,000 grant from TD Bank.
“It was a fabulous proposal,” TD Bank Office of Charitable Giving Director Paige Carlson-Heim said. “They’re talking about using the funds to expand homeowner education, which is already robust, and add new a dimension with post-purchase counseling.”
Expanding homeowner education is intended to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, condemnation or anything else that would force them out of the homes.
“We want to help ensure they’re in the best position they can be to maintain themselves as homeowner for the long term,” Carlson-Heim said. “We’re happy to support that.”
Some of the grant funding will be used to help fund efficiency upgrades aimed at lowering utility costs and helping to defray maintenance costs, so that needed repairs don’t get deferred for years.
In all, TD Bank distributed $7.2 million across 36 states. A change from last year was that all organizations got the same amount of money, $200,000. Last year, Sojourner House and Crossroads Rhode Island both received the grant funding, in slightly different amounts based on their grant requests.
“We were able to increase the overall pot by a modest amount, and it seemed like a challenge, juggling and squeezing different grant amounts into that budget,” Carlson-Heim said. “We know what our trusted partners use the funds for, and that’s why we tried to make an effort to increase the grant amount.”
Counseling services
Pawtucket Central Falls Development Executive Director Linda Weisinger said, in the past, much of the focus was on teaching people before they buy a house and during the house-buying process.
“We’re trying to support the first-time homebuyers, where the pre-purchase counseling has been successful, and now focusing on deeper level of post-purchase education,” she said.
To that end, the group is launching a new counseling program.
“It helps beyond the closing date, for things like budgeting support, home maintenance support, foreclosure prevention,” Weisinger said.
The group will be hiring to fill a new, full-time position to help with the program expansion, she said.
One of the projects starting up is peer-to-peer learning for things like basic maintenance. Since Pawtucket Central Falls Development is also its own contractor, it’s easy to put on the workshops.
“On average, people spend over $10,000 in their first year of home ownership, so how do we reduce that amount in different ways?” she said.
Real estate agents have said that first-time home buyers have been increasingly forced out of the market as the median house prices has risen from $250,000 in 2019 to over $500,000 in May, including homes with lots of deferred maintenance.
Read more about the state of the real estate market here.
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