Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Rent-To-Own Homes Ready In Central City

NEW ORLEANS -- A tidy, one-story house recently completed in a blighted part of New Orleans is part of a new rent-to-own program for poor to moderate-income people.

By 2009, the Comprehensive Central City Initiative, a coalition of faith-based groups, private developers and bank, hopes 178 homes in its portfolio. They will be leased to tenants whose monthly rent will put them on course to owning the property.

Under a program, those renters could move into a new home and apply their current federal rental subsidy to paying down the cost of the house over 15 years.

The majority of the lots where the group plans to build are in Central City - a the drug-and crime-saturated neighborhood, but a few of the lots are also scattered elsewhere.

Unlike the housing recovery efforts that actor Brad Pitt and Barnes & Noble Chairman Leonard Riggio have launched in other neighborhoods, this initiative is not purely charitable. The developers will turn a profit from renting the houses.

View more on Rent To Own Homes in New Orleans

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