What is the Home Investment Partnership Program (HOME)?
The HOME Investment Partnership Program (HOME) is one of the best HUD programs available. It’s the largest federal block grant designed exclusively to create affordable housing for low-income residents. It provides wide flexibility in how funds can be used, so your community can apply funds to where they’ll be most effective.
HOME encourages partnerships between state and local governments, nonprofits, and other entities to ensure healthy collaboration, aligned resources, and sound strategies. The participating jurisdictions (PJs) are required to match 25 cents of every dollar of program funds, which is a great incentive to get the community involved. HUD grants HOME funds on an annual basis.
How Funds May Be Used
HOME provides formula grants to states, and localities can use them to create or improve more affordable housing options. Funds are often used for building or buying homes, rehabilitating homes to make them safe and up to code, rental housing, and direct rent assistance. Some jurisdictions use funds for grants, direct loans, loan guarantees, security deposits and other forms of assistance.
Accessing and Implementing the Program
Because the HOME program is so broad and flexible, there are (and must be) safeguards in place to ensure they are used in an approved manner. While the specific use of funds has great flexibility, the strategies and fulfillment must be for the end goal of helping low-income households find safe, affordable housing. Grantees must follow HUD compliance from the point of applying for funds to their end use.
What localities often lack when working with HUD is the knowledge base of the program, as well as the staff, software, and resources to manage it. HUD recommends grantees using the services of a Technical Assistance Provider, a third party that knows the program, compliance, and can help your staff manage it.
Ensuring Desired Outcomes
Capital Access is a HUD Technical Assistance Provider, Federal Grants Manager, and innovator in affordable housing. We’ve worked with HUD programs for 27 years and share their goal of assuring that communities have plenty of safe, affordable housing. We see the barriers to accomplishing that, which, even with funds available, are lack of staff knowledge and resources, or unclear vision of what could be accomplished.
Capital Access helps localities with a vision of what’s possible and the strategies to get there. Our work with HUD and grantees led us to develop CAPGEMS, a customizable web-based software program that simplifies the management of HOMES grants. We consider CAPGEMS a Service with a System – it comes with the expertise that went into creating it. Our team is deeply experienced and motivated to help you implement the program.
If you go to the effort of applying for and obtaining a Home Investment Partnership Grant, it’s important for all involved to ensure its success. The main issue that derails progress is bumping into compliance issues. There’s a lot to navigate, and it’s more efficient and effective to have a team of experts leading the way. To learn more, contact us or call 215-551-2000.