The Coalition for Occupied Homes in Foreclosure (COHIF) is a Boston-based coalition of more than two dozen tenant, community, nonprofit, legal, and government agencies and organizations that came together in 2008 to work on keeping homeowners and tenants in their homes during and after the foreclosure process. It seeks to promote household and neighborhood stability and resident and community control of housing.
In 2010, COHIF helped achieve the passage of just-cause eviction protections for tenants in foreclosed properties and in 2013 facilitated the acquisition, rehab, and sale to an income-qualified homebuyer of a two-family foreclosed home that will be deed-restricted affordable for thirty years.
Its current initiative is the Greater Four Corners Community Stabilization Pilot Project in Dorchester, in which approximately thirty foreclosed or at-risk units would be acquired, rehabilitated, and placed into a new community land trust as affordable rental housing. An Equity Trust loan provided the key piece of leverage for COHIF to put together a financing package to purchase the first four buildings, comprising ten units, in the initial phase of the project. Dudley Neighbors, Inc. (DNI), a successful community land trust operating in a neighborhood near the project locus, is a partner in the project and will be providing logistical support for the creation of the CLT.
Equity Trust is particularly proud of this loan, which directly addresses almost every aspect of our mission:
- providing access to housing for low-income people
- promoting responsible use of land
- providing financing to organizations engaged in community economic development
- offering opportunities for people of greater economic means to support disadvantaged communities
- uniting organizations in common efforts for reform, and
- prioritizing programs addressing the urgent needs of low-income people.