It seems that every year, starting in December and ending sometime in January, I get to cleaning up the ol’ computer system, spiffin’ up the web site a bit…it tends to be a quiet time of the year, and lends itself well to these kinds of endeavors. As I was trolling through my hard disk, I came across a few odd bits that I’d been meaning to put up on my web site since last year.
One fantastic resource I discovered is a handout I got at an event put on down at the Santa Cruz Association of Realtors office in Soquel. Various local government agencies had put on a presentation for Realtors about the various affordable housing programs that we have here in the county. I had scanned the handout a long time ago, but never posted it on to my web page.
Good thing too, in a way, because since that time, I got ahold of some OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, which I used to convert this document from a picture to text, which improves the legibility of the document quite a bit.
This document has all kinds of great information in it. For example, did you know that many cities provide assistance for residents to come up with deposit money for a rental? Or that the county will reimburse permit fees for the construction of “second units” (“granny” units) if the unit is rented to lower income households? Or that the cities of Capitola and Watsonville both offer low-cost loans to homeowners to rehabilitate their older properties?
The handout also gives names and phone numbers of legal aid societies, low-cost/affordable housing developers, and shelters and transitional housing. It’s pretty amazing all the resources that are available here in Santa Cruz to help make one of the least affordable areas of the country a bit less so for people who need that assistance.
The PDF document can be downloaded by clicking on this link.
Find your Place
