If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily morning newsletter, How To LA. Every weekday, you'll get fresh, community-driven stories that catch you up with our independent local news.Anaheim has received $3.5 million to help create Orange County’s first city housing trust fund that will fill in funding gaps for affordable housing projects to help bring them over the finish line.
Anaheim’s city council must now decide who will serve on the board and manage the fund. Unlike cities like Irvine that run their housing programs as nonprofits, Anaheim intends to have the trust fund run as a city organization., more than 30,000 households are on the waitlist for Anaheim’s Section 8 Housing voucher program for low income families, the elderly and the disabled. Over 4,000 households are on the Affordable Housing interest list.
The new trust fund can be used not just for building affordable housing, but for creating programs to assist in homeownership and programs to prevent eviction. Mayor Ashley Aitken called the trust fund “another tool in our toolkit that makes sure that grants that we are receiving, partnerships with our business community that want to support our effort are being directed to Anaheim residents for projects built in Anaheim.”The decision means more than 100 tenants will get to stay in a West L.A.