Excerpts from the article:
Called the Friendly Neighbor program, the city is selling five homes for $1,000 apiece to a nonprofit faith-based housing group that will rehab them and sell them to first-time homebuyers. Once they're fixed up, the houses would sell for between $60,000 and $70,000, said Dina Harris, president of the Detroit-based Faith Community Home Buyers, which is working with the city on the project.
The program is based on two other efforts in which city-owned properties were sold and privately owned abandoned houses were turned over to new home buyers to rehab. Those two programs, which are no longer active, were riddled with problems in part because the homeowners often did not have the financing needed to repair the properties, which remained eyesores.
But unlike those other efforts, the Friendly Neighbor program, through Faith Community, will provide homeownership classes for the potential buyers that cover everything from obtaining and closing on a mortgage to repairing and maintaining the home. At the end of the eight-class seminar, the families will be mortgage ready, Harris said.
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