OUR BELIEF:

Rural Housing Preservation Foundation (RHPF) strongly believes that the rural population in the United States has the fundamental right, regardless of income, to have a decent and affordable place to live.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Section 515 Rural Rental Housing Program provides affordable homes to almost half a million of America’s most vulnerable residents: the elderly, people with disabilities, single-parent families, minorities, and women. Many of these residents earn, on average, less than $13,000 a year. At its peak in the early 1980s, the program created about 1,000 new properties a year. Since the mid-1990s, however, the program has faced severe budget cutbacks, thus limiting USDA’s ability to finance much-needed rehabilitation of existing properties and the construction of new properties to serve the rural renters. 

Meanwhile, thousands of aging affordable rental properties in non-Metropolitan Statistical Areas (identified as having populations below 25,000) desperately need rehabilitation and recapitalization (i.e. injection of new debt or equity to finance necessary repairs and upgrades) in order to remain inhabitable.

 

RHPF serves rural areas with a concentration of substandard multifamily rental housing and low-income populace. RHPF devotes itself to amassing majority ownership stakes in entities that own these aging rural multifamily properties in order to preserve their very existence and their long-term affordability. 

OUR GOALS:

 

■  To actively preserve and improve existing stock of affordable multi-family rental rural housing in United States.

■  To recapitalize and rehabilitate the existing supply of multi-family rental rural housing

■  To improve availability and affordability of quality rental housing in rural communities

■  To alleviate overcrowding in multifamily rental rural residences inhabited by low-income families

IMPLEMENTATION:

 

■  Focus on Rural Multifamily Rental Housing (i) Preservation, (ii) Rehabilitation and (iii) Recapitalization

 

■  Focus on Energy-efficiency and utilization of solar and other sources of renewable energy

 

■  Ownership for Long-Term affordability

 

■  Property Management only by USDA-approved/certified, independent 3-rd party management companies

 

■  Prevention of displacement of low-income tenants

 

■  Rural Community Outreach