A Jersey City based non-profit developer has converted nine vacant two-family houses into 18 affordable homes in some of the city?s neighborhoods hardest hit by foreclosures.

Officials from the Garden State Episcopal Community Development Corporation held a ribbon cutting last week on Tuesday at a three-story house at 152.5 Arlington Avenue, one of nine buildings in Greenville, Bergen/Lafayette and McGinley Square that have been renovated since going through foreclosure proceedings.

The program converts vacant ?crime havens? into family homes that boost the local real estate market, said Ricardo Rosario, senior development manager with the CDC.

?We stabilize the neighborhood by removing the blighted houses and increase rents and increase the value of comparative homes,? he added.

Under the program, renovated houses are sold for $210,000 to $245,000 to moderate-income families.

The new property owner pays a mortgage of roughly $1,900 a month for the two-family homes. The main apartment has three to five bedrooms, while the rental unit has three bedrooms and rents for roughly $900 a month, officials said.

At any given time, 250 to 300 homes are in foreclosure in Jersey City, said John Restrepo, the group?s director of Housing and Community Development.

The projected $3 million project is funded by a $922,000 federal grant, a $1 million loan from New Jersey Community Capital, a non-profit that provides financing for housing and community development projects, and proceeds from home sales, officials said.

?We are helping not just this house and the house next to us, we are helping our neighborhood and helping our entire city,? Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy said.


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