Updated: Apr 6, 2023
Neighborhood Finance Corporation has been lending in Des Moines since 1991. NFC provides unique lending programs and related services to help revitalize designated neighborhoods in Polk County and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. NFC has served 8,000 households in Des Moines making over $400 million in investments.
NFC’s lending helps people purchase homes, refinance existing mortgages, and secure home improvement renovation loans. They do this in partnership with Polk County and the cities of Des Moines, West Des Moines, Windsor Heights and Urbandale along with capital for lending raised from local financial institutions.
The lending areas where NFC operates were created in response to the impact of redlining and historic and discriminatory restrictions on access to capital. Those disparities are still quite apparent today as large racial and ethnic homeownership gaps exist in our community. While still providing lending to the community at large, NFC has been developing specific strategies to close these longstanding gaps.
In 2017, NFC was awarded funds that allowed the organization to offer down payment assistance and found that offering this benefit increased its lending to communities of color by 35%.
NFC has built on that progress by offering its Journey to Homeownership program which in its first year has nearly doubled the percentage of its loans to Black and African American homebuyers.
This year, NFC has just announced a new down payment assistance program that can provide up to a $30,000 deferred loan to eligible homebuyers purchasing in Polk County with an approved lender. This program will further expand the organization’s ability to help more people and families realize their dream of owning a home. Learn more about Neighborhood Finance Corporation at www.neighborhoodfinance.org.
This week, the Polk County Housing Trust Fund is sharing stories about some of our provider partners working to ensure housing opportunity for all. Make sure you sign up for e-mail updates to stay in touch when we share more stories like these.
Updated: May 8, 2023
Oakridge Neighborhood provides affordable, quality housing coupled with supportive service programs for residents and others in the community.
Located in the heart of the city just north of Methodist Hospital, the community is home to 1,000 residents, 72% of whom are immigrants and refugees. In total the Oakridge Neighborhood brings together people from 22 countries speaking 21 languages in Des Moines’ urban core.
Oakridge is unique in its ability to provide for the needs of low-income and refugee families through government-assisted permanent housing in conjunction with human services, making it an integral part of the Greater Des Moines housing and human services continuum.
Oakridge has been called a jewel in the heart of the community in part because of its wrap-around supportive services that help residents build community and thrive.
Many of those services focus on kids as shown in this video:
At Oakridge, people are engaged in programs from morning to night. On any given day at the 17-acre campus, you will find kids attending preschool, people participating in workforce programs to boost their household wealth, families receiving needed medical care, and a thriving, close knit community.
Through these services, Oakridge is helping some of Greater Des Moines’ most vulnerable people succeed and thrive.
Learn more about Oakridge Neighborhood at www.oakridgeneighborhood.org.
This week, the Polk County Housing Trust Fund is sharing stories about some of our provider partners working to ensure housing opportunity for all. Make sure you sign up for e-mail updates to stay in touch when we share more stories like these.
The City of Des Moines will dramatically expand homeowners' ability to construct Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) under an amendment to the city’s zoning code adopted by Council Monday night. ADUs are smaller homes that share a lot with a larger single-family home.
The changes allow ADUs to be built in residential areas across the city, a significant expansion over the earlier code, which only allowed them in areas already zoned for multifamily development. A press release by the City of Des Moines estimates ADUs will be allowed on 78 percent of the city's residential land following this change. In the remaining areas, other forms of multifamily housing are allowed.
Under this action by Council, ADUs would be legal to build “by right,” or with minimal city approvals, in more than half the city, including land already zoned for multifamily housing as well as areas near DART transit lines. With a conditional use permit approved by the Zoning Board of Adjustment, these homes would be allowed in other residential areas.
“We're trying to provide alternative housing options that give people different choices and provide more rooftops in Des Moines. I think that it's particularly important on our corridors and transit routes that have that extra layer of density but [need development that is] done in a way that is sensitive to the character of the neighborhood,” said Des Moines planning and urban design administrator Jason Van Essen.
Ahead of the vote, the City of Des Moines released a new resource explaining restrictions that apply to ADUs built in the city, including that they are restricted to half the size of the main house on the property and include on-site parking.
In addition, the property owner must live either in the main house or the ADU but can obtain a rental certificate for the other home on the lot if someone who is not in the homeowner's immediate family will live there. That move is intended to boost neighbors’ confidence that ADUs will not interfere with surrounding owner-occupied homes.
“An owner has to reside on the property, so you’re always going to have the actual property owner invested in what happens on that property, and I think more of the challenges that we’ve seen historically with properties that are rented is often you have the absentee landlord,” Van Essen said.
Van Essen said that while the city does not have a count of the current number of ADUs in Des Moines, they can be found in several neighborhoods. He estimated their number in the dozens, but not the hundreds, city-wide.
Local nonprofit HOME, Inc., is constructing one ADU in the Oak Park neighborhood of Des Moines. The Polk County Housing Trust Fund is tracking the construction of that home with videos on its YouTube channel.
Around the country, ADUs are known as a “gentle density” form of housing development which means neighbors may not even notice their addition on a given block. Des Moines city officials have said the expansion of ADU access aligns with changes to the city’s zoning code in 2019 and the city’s comprehensive plan, which calls for increasing housing options at various price points.
As an affordable housing strategy, one advantage of ADUs is that they do not require buying more land because they share a lot with another home. They are also an effective way of allowing smaller rental units into single-family neighborhoods where they may not otherwise be allowed, according to The ABCs of ADUs, a publication by the AARP, a national leader in advocating for ADUs across the country.
AARP also points out that ADUs are an excellent way for multiple generations of a family to live on the same property while each can keep their independence.
“It’s one thing that can be done to try to provide a variety of options for folks that are at different points in their lives,” Van Essen said. “We want to maintain our sense of place but also try to provide more housing, so I think this is a great way to do that.”
This change in zoning is the second recent policy change Des Moines has made to support more housing choices. In November, the city adjusted its development incentives to provide tax abatements for ADUs and missing middle housing – smaller multi-family developments that occupy the middle ground between single-family homes and larger apartment buildings.
Around the country, multiple changes in city codes are often necessary to spur more construction of ADUs. Van Essen acknowledged Des Moines' current actions might not be its last.
“You know zoning – it's all a living document [that’s] constantly being evaluated and changed, and so we’ll... continue to look at this and see how it goes and make changes in reaction to what we see,” he said.
Editor’s note: In the Des Moines zoning code, ADUs are referred to as Accessory Housing Units or AHUs. The two terms can be used interchangeably to describe the same type of housing.
This blog post was updated on May 10 to incorporate information from a City of Des Moines press release.