Grant money available for foreclosed homes

From the NY Times:

Home buyers may be given up to $50,000 toward buying a foreclosed home in New York, thanks to a federal fund that has been awarded to the city’s housing agency, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

The city agency is being given more than $20 million from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, which was created by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to help save and restore areas worst hit by the foreclosure crisis and pockmarked with blighted, empty homes.

To be eligible for the fund, a buyer’s household must earn less than the 120 percent of the neighborhood’s median income, according to Arden Sokolow, the housing agency’s director of Distressed Asset Finance. Buyers are also eligible for up to $30,000 to rehabilitate the site, she said.

The homes the agency hopes to rehabilitate and fill with people are across 95 census tracts, Ms. Sokolow said, but concentrated in areas hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis, like Jamaica, Queens, and in the Brooklyn communities of East Flatbush and Bushwick. Median incomes in these neighborhoods tend to be less than $50,000.