Our friends across the street at the Champlain Housing Trust (CHT) were selected as a winner of the TD Charitable Foundation’s 2011 Housing for Everyone competition, one of 25 selected nationally out of a pool of about 500 submissions.

The Housing for Everyone award comes with a $100,000 grant to advance CHT’s efforts to provide and sustain affordable housing in northwestern Vermont. The grant specifically will be dedicated to an expansion of the Champlain Housing Loan Fund, CHT’s affordable lending arm.

According to Nancy Eldridge, Executive Director of Vermont's Cathedral Square Corporation, programs that combine funding sources and care management approaches can provide cost effective, compassionate, and sustainable housing and care for low-income elderly people.    

Cathedral Square's innovative SASH program (Support and Services at Home) is just such a program, as Eldridge describes in Sunday's Burlington Free Press. 

It's time for VHFA's annual mitten drive for Burlington's King Street Center and we need your help.  Donations of new mittens, gloves, hats, or scarves  to our office on the corner of King and St. Paul Streets in Burlington are heartily welcome any time before Friday, December 9.  Waterproof gloves and mittens are especially appreciated. 

A $4.8 million federal housing grant for the Burlington Thayer Commons project was announced yesterday.   The grant will support the addition of 28 rent-subsidized units to the project.   

VHFA is providing 4% (bond) low-income housing tax credits as well as construction financing for the project. 

The location of the project on Burlington's North Avenue where the Department of Motor Vehicles once operated will offer seniors access to public transit, shopping, health care and other services. 

The development includes apartments rented at market rates and affordable senior and family apartments.   A total of 113 apartments are now under construction.