Thank you, Mr. Chair. We plan on having a briefing with committee, I think next week, on the latest findings and Community Needs Survey. So we are looking forward to having that discussion with them that I think is taking place next week. Again, we appreciate the Member’s comments on commending the corporation on the work that they are doing.
As far as the income threshold, when they are applying for the PATH program, the pathway to homeownership, we increased the threshold because we heard the concern that there were a lot of people that were just over SNIP and not being able to qualify for any more programs. It makes sense that if you are in a smaller community and if you have a couple of empty units there, you have somebody that might be just over SNIP. The pieces should fit and, of course, they should have the ability to maintain the unit, and that is one of the big things that we look at, is their ability to maintain the unit. We have run into too many cases in the past where we have put people in units that were just below SNIP and then they find out that they couldn’t afford it. That is something that we’re changing.
On the CARE side of it, the homeownership repair, if you have high income earners that are living in their own house, and we really haven’t raised the core need income threshold for that because it is a repair program. If they are higher income earners, then they should have the ability to do some of the work. You know, if you do it in stages and that, then it doesn’t get to a point where they have to apply for housing for a $92,000 CARE package to fix up their house. We have had pretty good success with that. Our CARE numbers are actually going down. The
people who are subscribing to CARE are actually going down.
But on the homeownership side, that is one that we want to concentrate on and ensure that we have folks that are just getting started and maybe making a little bit more. Those are the people that we would like to target and get them into homeownership because we feel that they will be successful clients. Thank you, Mr. Chair.