Preserving & Promoting Affordable Housing in Chattanooga: New Fund Makes First Grants to Two Big Projects

We’ve worked hard to make Chattanooga one of the most desirable and dynamic cities in the south, and we see the results around us — unemployment is at an all-time low and new families are moving into our community all the time. Growth is good, but it does push the cost of living here higher and higher. Chattanooga has seen some of the highest income growth of any city in the United States, but wages are still struggling to keep up with rising home prices.

Mayor Berke’s administration and the Chattanooga City Council have worked together to commit substantial resources to one of the most effective new tools we have to address this complex problem — the Chattanooga Affordable Housing Fund. At last week’s meeting of the Health, Education and Housing Facilities Board, grants were made from this fund to two projects that will preserve and promote affordable housing in our community:

• The Chattanooga Housing Authority’s Emerald Village project, a 111-unit development that will provide new rental units for extremely low income families. The Affordable Housing Fund is supplying $400,000 of this $7 million project.
• Habitat For Greater Chattanooga’s 15 new construction-ready homes at the Villages at Alton Park, which will provide pathways to homeownership for low to moderate-income families. The total project cost is just over $2 million, of which the Affordable Housing Fund will grant just under $200,000.

More projects are in the pipeline. If you are a developer or community development organization that would like information about how to apply for support from the Affordable Housing Fund, please call our Department of Economic & Community Development at (423) 643–7300.

Robust, ongoing support for the Affordable Housing Fund was one of the key recommendations from last year’s Housing Connections Conferences. Click here to read the full report from the conferences.