HUD Awards Choice Neighborhoods Planning Grants

HUD recently awarded nearly $5 million to six communities to help create plans to redevelop severely distressed HUD assisted housing and revitalize neighborhoods. Funded through HUD's Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, these grants are intended to help local leaders to craft comprehensive, homegrown plans to revitalize and transform these neighborhoods.

HUD's Choice Neighborhoods Initiative promotes a comprehensive approach to transforming neighborhoods struggling to address the interconnected challenges of distressed housing, inadequate schools, poor health, high crime, and lack of capital. Choice Neighborhoods Choice Neighborhoods is focused on three core goals:

• Housing: Replace distressed public and assisted housing with high-quality mixed-income housing that is well managed and responsive to the needs of the surrounding neighborhood.
• People: Improve outcomes of households living in the target housing related to employment and income, health, and children’s education; and
• Neighborhood: Create the conditions necessary for public and private reinvestment in distressed neighborhoods to offer the kinds of amenities and assets, including safety, good schools, and commercial activity, that are important to families' choices about their community.