FAYETTEVILLE — Affordable housing in Fayetteville could get a little boost from Home Depot.
The city is considering a partnership with the National Center for Appropriate Technology to apply for a $500,000 grant. The center is a 30-year-old nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting community development through sustainable food production and energy efficiency.
The money would help pay for the design, engineering and trail development for the project, which will build a 72-unit mixed rental and owner-occupied housing development on a 7.7-acre site along Washington Avenue between Ninth and 11th streets, known as the Houses at Willow Bend.
The grant is paid for through the Home Depot Foundation, which is set to spend $400 million in the next 10 years on affordable housing and urban forestry projects, according to details of the program. Fayetteville is one of eight cities selected as a finalist for the grant. In July, that list will be culled to four, said Melissa Terry, an energy programs assistant with the center’s Fayetteville office.
The Council will consider applying for the grant at Tuesday’s meeting. It requires a $50,000 match, which officials say can be paid through the city’s trail construction program by committing a trail to the site.
John Coleman, city sustainability coordinator, said the city can match the grant with another $50,000 through the city’s nutrient reduction fund — a plan to reduce storm water runoff — by drafting a low impact development and engineering and construction manual, a project already on the radar of the Fayetteville development services division.
“We’re not taking it from one program and putting it toward something else,” Coleman explained.
And since the project needs to qualify as a “sustainable community plan,” which means building in low-impact transportation options, a trail spur will position Fayetteville in a more favorable light for grant evaluators, Coleman added.
“We felt like we weren’t addressing that until we addressed the trail construction,” Coleman said. If Fayetteville is awarded the grant, about $140,000 will be earmarked for trail construction, he added.
The Houses at Willow Bend, planned for the Walker Park neighborhood, is a concept first put forward by the Fayetteville Partners for Better Housing, a private nonprofit organization that operates as an extension of the Fayetteville Housing Authority. The Partners is still heading up the project, however the National Center for Appropriate Technology will be the lead organization when it comes to applying for the Home Depot grant, since the center has a long, and proven track record when it comes to getting grants, said Hugh Earnest, a member of the Partners for Better Housing Board of Directors.
Ideally, the homes built in Houses at Willow Bend development will cost in the $70 per square foot range, say officials with the Partners board.
“This is not going to be the silver bullet,” Earnest said at last Thursday’s Partners for Better Housing board meeting, speaking toward possibility of Fayetteville securing the $500,000 grant. “We are still going to have to hustle to get money from a lot of sources.”