Governor Hogan today announced the launch of a $10 million initiative to rehabilitate homes in Baltimore City’s Johnston Square and Pine Street in Cambridge.
The Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) will run the program through a mix of grant and loan investment.
The Homeownership Works (HOW) pilot program will rehabilitate historic properties, create new properties in formerly vacant lots, help homeowners with home repairs, and provide free legal services for low income homeowners.
“Even if a home is historic, it needs to be maintained, and housing values in many older historic neighborhoods are declining due to aging and the prevalence of vacant and deteriorated housing stock, and the cost to restore or build new housing,” Secretary Kenneth C. Holt of DHCD said in a statement.
“This new, targeted homeownership initiative will help fill that financial gap, creating new affordable homeownership opportunities, helping existing homeowners, and stabilizing irreplaceable historic communities,” he said.
In Cambridge, DHCD will work with Habitat for Humanity Choptank and the City of Cambridge.
For the Johnston Square initiative, DHDC will work with nonprofits ReBUILD Metro and ReBUILD Johnston.
The initiative is one of many recent efforts to improve conditions in the Johnston Square neighborhood, which has struggled with crime and urban blight for decades.
In February 2020, city officials and Johnston Square Partners, which includes ReBUILD Metro and ReBUILD Johnston, released a $160 million revitalization plan for the neighborhood.
The plan includes the rehabilitation of 700 neglected properties and the development of a park.
In July of this year, local leaders, ReBUILD, and other developers opened an affordable housing community, Greenmount & Chase, as part of the revitalization plan.
The new homeownership pilot program is expected to benefit more than 100 Maryland homeowners.
The program will take place over the next year.
