Courtesy Photo
The Aspen Pitkin County Housing Authority recently kicked off a first-of-its-kind program to open up public funding for the upkeep or maintenance of privately-owned, deed-restricted housing.
The Home Repairs Pilot Grant Program is available to APCHA homeowners within Categories 1-3 to fund up to $10,000 in home repairs not covered by Homeowners Association (HOA) capital reserves for an individual unit. The funds are not available for cosmetic projects, rather essential repairs that relate to residents’ health and safety.
Matthew Gillen, APCHA’s executive director, said this program is the culmination of more than a year of work and the program will inform future APCHA initiatives by collecting a data set of APCHA ownership units seeking assistance for repairs.
“This is going back to the overall APCHA struggle of maintaining the sustainability of the program and giving people tools to maintain their own unit,” he said. “It’s been a long time in the making.”
How to apply and receive a grant
- (Optional) Receive a repair quote/estimate
- Fill out the Google Form application
- Complete qualification
- Owners must provide this information for anyone on the unit title;
- Last year’s W2 or 1099, last year’s tax return, and an employment verification form to document full-time employment.
- Drop off forms in-person at the APCHA office or upload forms to your account on HomeTrek.
- Owners must provide this information for anyone on the unit title;
Grant applications will be accepted from Oct. 16 until 8 a.m., Oct. 30. If not all funds are utilized, the application will remain open, and grants will continue to be awarded on a rolling basis until depletion of funds.
Both the City of Aspen and Pitkin County contributed $200,000, totaling $400,000 of public funds for the program. Should the program succeed, Gillen predicted the city and county as the primary funders in the future, though as it is only a pilot program it is too soon to say for sure.
Owners will be required to partially match the grant funds, which follows a sliding scale. Category 1 owners must match 10% of funds, Category 2 20%, and Category 3 30%.
If the owner’s property’s deed restriction is not the current APCHA deed restriction, the owner must update it by signing a new deed restriction.
“The most updated deed restriction doesn’t have a cap on health and safety repairs,” said Liz Axberg, housing policy analyst with the City of Aspen. “And so for a lot of people, it’s actually a benefit to sign that new deed restriction.”
Gillen noted that updating deed restrictions would also help weed out those that have expiration or sunset dates and keep deed restrictions in perpetuity, benefitting APCHA and the community.
A notable exception
Centennial Condominiums is a deed-restricted, 92-unit development in East Aspen. All units are Category 4 – outside of the purview of the repairs pilot program – but the Centennial HOA has a 14-year history of seeking APCHA’s help in funding what they calculate to be millions of dollars in health and safety repairs.
In 2015, the HOA sued APCHA and its local government partners – the City of Aspen and Pitkin County – to hold them financially responsible for structural repairs the organization blamed on “decades of water damage caused by shoddy construction and poor design.” The HOA renewed the litigation in February.
Jason Closic is a Centennial Condominium homeowner and longtime board member of HOA. He said he’s glad to see APCHA recognizing the need to invest public funds in existing properties after years of being told a program like this was not possible or likely.
“It’s taken this long, but they’ve kind of come to the realization that investing in their current inventory is worthwhile,” he said. “It’s absolutely a great path for for them to take; and just building housing and not preserving the existing housing is not going to lead to an overall positive outcome.”
He also said repair projects needed at Centennial Condiminiums are overwhelmingly, if not all, HOA responsibilities, and that even the full fund allocated to the pilot program, $400,000, would barely scratch the surface of the estimated repair costs at Centennial Condominiums — not to mention that the program is for individual units, not HOAs.
The home repairs pilot program is designed to benefit APCHA’s lowest income categories, Gillen said. For a Category 3 2-person household, maximum income is $118,950. For a 2-person household in Category 4, the maximum income is $187,575.
But a similar program for HOAs is being explored. Gillen said that APCHA has posted a Request for Proposals seeking a company to assess APCHA-affiliated HOAs capital needs.