Hartford Place Apts
Lexington, KY - With $1,634,000 coming from various state and non-profit agencies, the Community Ventures Corporation announced the purchase and rehab of a 49-unit apartment complex that had languished and was in foreclosure.
The project utilized $734,000 for the Kentucky Department for Local Governments, $600,000 from the Attorney General’s Office and a $300,000 grant from NeighborWorks America/Capital Funding for the Rehabilitation of Affordable Housing to take over the complex and rehab 16 vacant units that had 40-plus year-old troublesome plumbing.
“We ended up with safe and affordable housing for 49 families,” said CVC President Kevin Smith of the Hartford Place Apartments off Eastland Parkway just outside New Circle Road. “We have a more stable neighborhood and we have one more property that is out of foreclosure and back on the market and being used the way that it should.”
The funding from the Attorney General’s Office is part of a $25 Billion settlement reached last year between the attorneys general of 49 states and Bank of American, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and Ally/GMAC in a case involving the railroading of foreclosures that resulted out of the 2008 economic downturn. Kentucky got $59 million of that sum and Attorney General Jack Conway praised Gov. Steve Beshear for granting his request to issue a line item veto in last year’s budget that would have ceded control over the settlement money to the legislature for more general use.
From 2008 through last year, Conway said there were nearly 67,000 Kentucky homes in foreclosure. The 11-figure settlement with the nation’s five largest lenders stemmed from the rapid large-scale foreclosures, many of which were deemed to have been done without due process, proper documentation and systematic forgery of signatures.
But Conway said the funds his office now controls can help make the dream of homeownership or at least in this case proper housing more achievable.
“It’s easy to say that number, 49,” Beshear said about the number of apartments that were purchased out of foreclosure in this project. “But we need to think what that really means. That’s 49 families, that’s 49 men, women and children that are able to be a lot more secure, a lot more comfortable, have a lot more pride and a lot more opportunity in the future.”
Apartments range from $458 for a studio apartment to $535 for a single bedroom and $700 for a two-bedroom apartment. All utilities are paid and any one interested should contact the apartment’s leasing office at 859-368-0674. As currently occupied apartments open up, those will be renovated and put up for lease.