A $2.5-million gift being announced Friday will create a new mortgage fund to help up to 60 households in southwest Detroit transition from renters to homeowners.

If successful, the program run by the nonprofit civic group Southwest Solutions could become a model for matching private philanthropy with civic and city expertise to create more quality affordable housing in Detroit.

The gift comes from Judith Yaker, widow of the late Sam Yaker, who spent his career in real estate development in metro Detroit and had a special interest in affordable housing. The gift will create the Sam L. and Judith Yaker Fund to support quality affordable housing in an eight-block area of the Chadsey-Condon neighborhood in southwest Detroit.

The project focuses on the Newberry Homes, a development of scattered site single-family rental housing built around 2000 with low-income tax credits. There are about 60 houses in the project, most of them featuring three bedrooms, 1.5 baths, and a one-car attached garage.

Renters in the houses tend to have household incomes at or below 60% of the area median income, or roughly from $17,000 to $31,000 per year, with several tenants below that.

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These lower-income residents face challenges being able to afford decent homes as housing values rise sharply in some Detroit neighborhoods. That's especially true in places like Chadsey-Condon, which is not far from Corktown where housing prices have been skyrocketing. That's in part thanks to Ford's recent announcement that it will buy the old Michigan Central Station and create a new Ford campus around it.

One resident who will benefit is Verion Walker, 48, who has rented her house in the Newberry Homes district for almost 10 years. A single parent, she wasn't able to buy a home before now because of other family expenses.

"My main reason for not being a homeowner sooner is because the plan that I had for my children was for all of them to go to college," she said Thursday. "I had to make choice: Do I invest in my children’s education or do I invest in buying a home? It wasn’t that I didn’t think about home ownership. It was that with me being a single parent, I had to make choices."

More residents will face similar choices soon as housing prices in Detroit continue to climb.

"We’re seeing drastically increased housing values, even before the Ford announcement, in Corktown and Hubbard Richard and Hubbard Farms," said Tim Thorland, executive director of Southwest Housing Solutions, an arm of the civic group.

"For folks associated with job opportunities in Corktown that are at or below $60,000 a year, they’re going to find it challenging to live where they work. And we need to be able to identity some other neighborhoods that can have some upside here."

That's why a program that aims to transition renters into homeowners can play such an important role in Detroit's recovery.

"Affordable home ownership is an important way to create inter-generational wealth. It moves people out of poverty and helps them build assets," said Steve Ragan, senior vice president for Southwest Solutions.

The civic group will use the Yaker gift to create a new mortgage fund to help the current rental tenants afford to buy their houses and become homeowners, building equity for the future.

The money will also pay for repairs to some of the units that are run-down, for counseling for potential homeowners and for neighborhood beautification work.

Southwest Solutions estimates that the net average sales price will be about $35,000, low enough to allow some of the renters to build equity as homeowners.

The ongoing mortgage payments will generate about $40,000 a year in income to cover fund expenses. As the loans are repaid, the money will be used to fund new mortgages.

It's the paring of individual philanthropy with a nonprofit entity like Southwest Solutions to support home ownership that makes this program so promising.

"I hope it’s a pilot or model," Thorland said. "You’ve got 1,300 of these (low-income tax credit) single family units scattered across the city. There are very few, if any, examples of an effective strategy to get these units transitioned from rental to ownership. We believe this is a model that can work. We intend to prove it can work."

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.