John Gallagher

Detroit Free Press

With apartment rental rates rising sharply in Detroit's greater downtown, the civic group Midtown Detroit Inc. is launching a new program dubbed "Stay Midtown" to offer cash assistance to lower-income families in danger of being priced out of the market.

The pilot program is aimed at residents of Midtown with annual household incomes that are 50% to 80% of area median income levels, or as low as $23,450 for a single person or $30,150 for a single parent with two children.

Residents qualifying for help would receive up to $4,500 over a three-year period to bring their total housing expenses down to 30% of their income, a level considered normal under federal guidelines.

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Sue Mosey, president of Midtown Detroit Inc., said the pilot program is a companion to her group's highly successful Live Midtown program of recent years that paid incentives to residents to move into the district.

"We thought that since we were incentivizing people to move here, we might as well try to help people who have a housing burden deal with their rent acceleration," she said.

The pilot program is the latest effort in Detroit to balance the rapid redevelopment of the greater downtown with due care for the long-term residents who face displacement by rising rents and other pressures. As Mosey noted, trying to maintain a diverse and stable population in the face of rapid urban revitalization is a problem facing many other urban districts across the country.

"Everybody wants to keep an income-diverse neighborhood. Everybody knows that that's important here. This is a very complicated dynamic," she said, but added, "I think we're going to get some good results from this."

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A little over $400,000 is available to pay incentives, with funding coming from the Kresge Foundation, Ford Foundation and the specialized lender Capital Impact Partners, which also helped design the program. Full-time students and residents already receiving help under other rental assistance programs are not eligible. Residents must live within the expressways that create the core Midtown boundaries — I-75 on the east and south, the Lodge on the west, and I-94 on the north.

For more information and to apply, visit the website staymidtown.org.

"It is for those people that have a housing burden but don't really have other sources of funding to deal with it," Mosey said.

“Our challenge in Detroit isn’t just to see the city recover, but to see a recovery that’s inclusive and equitable,” said Bryan Hogle, the Kresge Foundation's Detroit Program officer. “Just as Live Midtown played a role in reviving Midtown, we’re looking to Stay Midtown for lessons on how to keep Midtown grounded as an economically and racially diverse community while increasing opportunity and improving the quality of life.”

The program will also offer counseling to residents who may need to relocate to find rents appropriate to their incomes.

Mosey estimated the program would help about 100 households during the pilot phase. "I'm sure we'll find out a lot about how we can help everybody by doing this," she said.

Just in the first few days since launching the program last week, there have been about 200 inquiries about it, she added.

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