Community Housing Partnership Program - The Salt & Light Company, Inc.

Explore Our Program

Beginning of the Dollar Homes Program

In May of 2000 HUD launched the Dollar Homes program within its Good Neighbor Program to help move distressed properties into mainstream homeownership by linking local governments with non-profit organizations. The program allows for foreclosed properties that have been on the market for six months or more to be made available to local governments for nominal sum of $1.00. HUD's goal is to use these properties to help increase the supply of affordable housing for low and moderate income families.

The Affordable Homes Group, through its property development arm, The Salt & Light Company, has partnered with nine municipal governments in New Jersey over the last three years. We have completed and sold nine homes and are in the final stages of finishing and preparing to sell two more. Because of the low cost of purchasing these properties, we are able to put in improvements and make modifications that bring older homes with many problems up meet some of today's best standards. We are able to spend tens of thousands of dollars in rehabbing a property and still sell it at a price below its original, as-is value.

Over the past three and a half years, we have learned how to develop working partnerships with municipal and county governments in our neighboring states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut. We have already completed four projects in these states and are in the process of completing another in Maryland, where a new modular home will be set in place for an income-eligible first time homeowner.

In our experience we have grown to believe that good quality affordable housing can be developed in many more communities, and so we have consciously been expanding our program to reach out to local governments in a wider area, since most of the information we need to access is readily available on the internet. Through the internet, faxes, emails, wire transfer of funds and overnight delivery of documents, we believe that we can do business almost as effectively out of state as within our own.

Our program has expanded to include Dollar Homes projects in North Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Massachusetts and Michigan. We are ready, willing and able to take on additional projects in states east of the Mississippi River where it is economically feasible. As a result of these expanded efforts we have developed the Community Partnership Program.