Mecklenburg Times: News for Mecklenburg, Union and Iredell counties Real Estate, Development, Construction, and Community News in the Charlotte area and throughout Mecklenburg, Union and Iredell counties
This house on Heflin Street in Grier Heights was under construction last January and is now one of the eight completed homes in Phase 1 of the Elizabeth Heights subdivision. File photo by Tony Brown
GRIER HEIGHTS – Wells Fargo & Co. on Monday gave $100,000 to a Charlotte nonprofit to help revitalize this historically black neighborhood near where East 7th Street becomes Monroe Road.
CrossRoads Corp. for Affordable Housing and Community Development is one of 67 nonprofit neighborhood revitalization programs across the country that will share a $6 million disbursement by the Wells Fargo Housing Foundation and its Leading the Way Home program.
The money will be used to launch Phase 2 of the Elizabeth Heights subdivision, a neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood that is being developed by CrossRoads and built by the Center for Community Self-Help, a nonprofit based in Durham.
“Wells Fargo has been extremely supportive of Phase 1 of Elizabeth Heights, giving us $30,000,” said Don Gately, executive director of CrossRoads. “This grant will allow the homes in Phase 2 to be subsidized to make them more affordable for buyers.”
CrossRoads, Self-Help and builder JCB Urban recently completed the eight-home Phase 1 of Elizabeth Heights, which will eventually be a 36-home subdivision on lots that previously supported boarded-up duplexes. Five homes have sold and three are on the market.
The ranch and two-story homes in Phase 1 were built for about $170,000 each and sell in the $130,000s. They are available only to qualified buyers who make around $52,000 a year, or 80 percent of the area’s median household income. Grants like the one from Wells Fargo and money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development help make up the difference between building costs and prices.
“We received multiple requests in the Charlotte area – we see a lot of need there – and CrossRoads’s Elizabeth Heights project was chosen by our Leading the Way Home committee as being the most impactful,” said San Francisco-based Wells spokesman Chris Hammond.
Phase 2 of Elizabeth Heights, which Gately says he hopes will break ground early next year, will be an additional eight homes that will cost slightly more to build and buy as material and labor prices have risen.
With the help of grants and several individual “angel” donors, the two nonprofits have so far invested about $1.3 million in land and $1.4 million in construction in Elizabeth Heights.
