The city of Maplewood will hold a Public Hearing at its Tuesday council meeting to discuss the allocation of $64,000 in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds.
In past years much of it has gone to the city’s home improvement grant program, which are available to areas that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) designates as ‘low to moderate income’.
Below is a map of those areas in Maplewood. Parts of all three wards are included.
See the full map of the HUD Low to Moderate Income Population here.
something tells me the map has not been updated in 10+ years.
The CDBG area data is reported to be from 2016.
So Walmart and Lowes are low income? Go figure.
You are correct. I live in the qualifying area as it is based on census tract data and there are a preponderance of apartments in the tract. Unless the federal government gerrymanders the census tracts they won’t be homogeneous with regard to income level. I wish the had more discretion with regard to location of need, but we are working under HUD guidelines.
For those people concerned about last year’s funds not being used, it is only because the recipient income levels need to be verified before the money is disbursed. I don’t believe that there will be any surplus grant funds that would go unused.
Additional reading:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2017/03/18/trump-community-development-block-grant-cut-would-affect-millions/#5cfa41d26248
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-budget-asks-for-6-billion-in-hud-cuts-drops-development-grants/2017/03/15/1b157338-09a0-11e7-b77c-0047d15a24e0_story.html?utm_term=.017565b57e51
It doesn’t look optimistic that this program will be continued under the new federal budget.
Apparently this is low to moderate compared to other parts of the same city? I’m in an uncircled part of Maplewood and I cannot afford ANY of the houses in the circled parts of Webster Groves…
The definition of the eligible areas are where 51% of the households are low to moderate income. Under the CDBG, “moderate income” is a household making 80% of the median income for that area. This can vary widely between different CDBG areas. In a circled Webster area, where the median income is somewhere above $53k, that would mean more than 51% of households in that area make below 42k (80% of $53k). The picture for the NE corner of Maplewood is quite different, where the median income is $24k, so 51% of the households in that area make below $19k to meet CDBG classification as moderate to low income. Talking about the CDBG program as a whole, one could argue that the classification is not quite apples to apples between CDBG eligible communities, as you seem to imply.
sorry, *east-of-sutton*
Yeah, that is messed up!
The south-of-manchester, west-of-sutton area is “low-to-moderate” income? There are some quite expensive houses in that area…
Go figure.