Arizona Housing Fund announces new housing grants

The Arizona Housing Fund (AZHF) announced $500K in grants to four nonprofits for projects that will help to provide homes to Arizona’s most vulnerable individuals and families.

Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS) received a $100,000 grant for their Senior Haven project in Phoenix. The Haven will provide 134 units of transitional and emergency housing for senior citizens experiencing homelessness.

Housing for Hope (housing affiliate of Catholic Charities Community Services) received a $150,000 grant for their Pinyon Pointe Apartments project in Page, Arizona.

Housing Solutions for Northern Arizona received a $150,000 grant for JoJo’s Place Transitional Housing in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Native American Connections received a $100,000 grant for housing disabled or homeless adults in Phoenix, Arizona.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 13,500 people were homeless in Arizona in 2022, with 59.2% living unsheltered.

Tim Sprague, Owner and Partner of Habitat Metro LLC and an AZHF Advisory Committee member, joined us with Lisa Glow, Chief Executive Officer at Central Arizona Shelter Services, to discuss these grants.

How does the AZHF decide which projects to take on?

“LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation) comes to us with the results from a request for proposals that we put out on a bi-annual basis. We look at projects, we analyze them in terms of what kind of past history the developers have and what’s their capacity to get a project done? And we choose from a selection, this last time it was 10, and we chose four that made sense to come in and finish,” Sprague said.

The grants are not on any schedule, meaning the funds are dispersed whenever they are available.

The grant given to CASS will be used to help renovate an old hotel that will temporarily house 170 seniors, 55 and older, at a time.

“This is a new model of helping formerly homeless seniors as they transition out of homelessness. It’s a closed campus model, all services on sight, one to 15 case management ratios, and it’s the first in the nation of its sort. So we’re super excited about that. We think these are some of the models of the future that the AZHF can help be leveraged and get open,” Glow said.