City acts to save rundown homes.

The days when the city regularly foreclosed upon slum lords property have passed; but in this tight housing market, foreclosures still presented enough of a threat to motivate the city to secure $14 million to repair or preserve deteriorating subsidized affordable housing.

The money will be allocated within the city's share of the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development capital budget.

Under the current HUD policies, subsidized developments can be foreclosed upon if a building falls into poor financial or physical conditions. HUD housing is a relatively small slice of the housing overall in the city; comprising only 7000 units. Approximately 4000 of these units are considered distressed and in urgent need of repair.

With many of the city's incentive programs, such as low income tax credits and Mitchell Lama housing, set to expire and the housing market booming, it is vital to secure every affordable housing unit out there, said Jim Himes, executive director of Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing financer.

Whether the $14 million will go to repair properties for existing owners or facilitate the transfer of property to new, responsible owners, has not been determined.

The program will expand a partnership developed between the city and HUD officials in 2004 which has saved over 2000 units of housing and kept it from being put up for public auction.

"When HUD housing falls into disrepair, the answer shouldn't be to auction off the property on the open market," said Eric MartinDilan, housing and buildings chair of the city council. "What we need to do is rehabilitate those properties, find the responsible owners for them, and keep them in the affordable housing stock."

The team will apply the lessons the city learned while transforming the nearly 900,000 units of In-Rem stock--property foreclosed upon over several decades into viable housing, said Neill Coleman, spokesperson for the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Last year, residents of the 231 low income units in the Ennis Francis house learned how uncertain their future could become when their building was seized after one of the city's negligent owners didn't repair their heating system, holes packed with raw sewage and leaking ceilings.

On the same day their property was brought to the auction block, Abyssinian Developers, armed with a $5 mil lion loan from Enterprise Community Partners, took over the property through a legal program. The developers have worked to clean up the building and maintain the units subsidized status.

If the property had gone up for auction, a developer who won the bid to the property could have conceivably spruced it up and eventually forced out the low and middle income residents.

"There are now 400 affordable housing units in the development. Ennis Francis is one of the better examples of the ways in which preventing foreclosure can help preserve affordable housing, as the development is South of 125th street, one of the neighborhoods that has been changing so rapidly in the past few years and right in the crosshairs of market rate development," Himes said. According to a report issued earlier this year by the Center for an Urban Future, about 2,000 units of HUD housing were slated for public auction between 2003 and 2005. The funding helps to prevent this housing from being lost to low or middle income residents and to facilitate properties renovation.