Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville ended 2024 on a high note, receiving a $29.1 million grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development on December 19. The grant to Habitat was the second largest awarded by HUD, which gave more than $225 million to 17 organizations across the country.
“Every Virginian deserves access to safe, affordable housing,” said Virginia Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner in a press release celebrating the grant. “We are glad that this federal funding will help support homes and communities in Charlottesville, and we will keep working to support housing accessibility throughout the Commonwealth.”
The almost $30 million grant will support Habitat’s work at Southwood, a mobile-home community just outside of Charlottesville that’s undergoing resident-led redevelopment. According to the nonprofit’s President and CEO, Dan Rosensweig, the money will help with projects including work on Hickory Street and core utilities.
“It’s also funding things that were things we had hoped for but hadn’t necessarily planned for because there wasn’t funding for it,” he says, mentioning the potential construction of a community center, credit union, and health care facility. “That’s all stuff that we had sort of dreamed of, but without this funding, it wasn’t necessarily part of the program.”
Work at Southwood is expected to total more than $500 million, with an anticipated completion in 2037. The redevelopment has prioritized not displacing residents, and will add more than 500 new affordable housing units to the Charlottesville area over time.
“As opposed to the fairly standard hodgepodge of funding that’s available, getting a large grant like this allows us to plan, to be more efficient, to know that we’re doing something within a certain time frame, so that we can give residents advance notice,” says Rosensweig. “It’s really a game changer in terms of our ability to plan.”
While the $29.1 million HUD grant is a major boon for the nonprofit, Habitat will still need support from local groups and government in its work on the redevelopment. “We still need all of the funding sources that we had [previously projected],” says Rosensweig. “We still are going to need some local funding from the county, although potentially not quite as much.”
Habitat has a busy year ahead with both new and ongoing construction, including work on Village 3 of Southwood—the first portion of the old mobile-home park to be redeveloped—slated to resume soon. The nonprofit expects to work on around 70 homes in 2025, in Southwood and other communities in the area.
In addition to its work at Southwood, Habitat will also focus on building relationships with residents of Carlton Mobile Home Park this year. The nonprofit purchased CMHP in September 2024 after joining Charlottesville City and Piedmont Housing Alliance to prevent the displacement of approximately 200 people. Habitat has expanded its staff to support the large-scale community engagement efforts at both Southwood and CMHP, which will remain a mobile-home park for three years before undergoing redevelopment.
“We didn’t want to rob from Peter to pay Paul,” says Rosensweig. “We were able to hire a property manager specifically for Carlton and expand our community engagement staff a little bit so that we can work in Southwood and Carlton, without compromising any of the work that we do.”
Looking ahead, Habitat and other affordable housing advocates are anticipating potential impacts to funding under the Trump administration and Republican control of Congress.
“The incoming administration had talked about housing … in a little bit more vague way,” says Rosensweig. While he says Habitat and other affordable housing advocates are unsure of what to expect, there is some optimism surrounding preferential tax treatment of investments for communities like Southwood, given support for opportunity zones by HUD secretary appointee Scott Turner.
Still, there’s a lot of uncertainty and doubt surrounding the availability of future federal funds for affordable-housing programs.
“It’s going to require the local philanthropic community to continue to step up and support us and other housing providers,” says Rosensweig. “Local [and] state governments are going to probably need to … pull a little bit more of the freight than they had before.”