Arizona Daily Star: Tucson program to help essential workers buy homes

Nicole Ludden, Arizona Daily Star

The city of Tucson is collaborating with Tucson Industrial Development Authority to dole out $625,000 to help cover closing costs on homes for an estimated 250 essential workers.

The new program, called the Essential Workers Housing Fund, will launch June 1 and provide essential workers up to 1% of the first mortgage loan amount or up to $2,500 of a down payment on a home.

Tucson is putting $500,000 of its American Rescue Plan dollars toward the initiative, a move Mayor Regina Romero called a “transformative investment” in the community.

“The importance of homeownership in our community cannot be understated and overstated. Essential workers kept us safe during the pandemic, they kept working to keep all of us safe and our economy working,” Romero said at a news conference Wednesday.

The program comes at a time of increasing housing prices across the region. In 2020, about 91% of Tucson homebuyers had a home loan approved for about $215,000, according to data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Average sales prices for all new and existing homes was $303,356 in January 2020 and rose to $422,407 in January 2022.

Dre Thompson, the CEO of the Tucson Industrial Development Authority, said she began working with other local real estate groups to come up with a way to reduce barriers to homeownership after the Arizona House Commerce Committee received a report in February that if an intervention wasn’t made, essential workers would be “boxed out of the housing market in Arizona.”

“Essential workers are the bedrock of our workforce, and it is so vital that they are able to access the benefits of homeownership, the stability that it brings, the opportunity to provide generational wealth for families that haven’t always had that,” Thompson said, later adding, “I feel like this exemplifies what public-private partnerships should look like, that community partners embedded in an issue come together to develop programs.”

Recipients of the Essential Workers Housing Fund must qualify for the Pima Tucson Homebuyers Solution Program, which provides down payment assistance to cover out-of-pocket mortgage expenses. The program says its participants receive on average $14,000 in a 100% forgivable loan and save $16,500 in closing and down payment costs if they stay in their home for three years.

Professions that qualify for the loan are those outlined by the Centers for Disease Control as both medical and nonmedical field essential workers. Some of those qualified occupations include hospital workers, pharmacy workers, care facility workers, first-responders, veterinarians, educators, postal workers, transit workers, manufacturing facility workers, agricultural and food-service workers.

While the Tucson Realtors Charitable Foundation is the title sponsor of the fund, several groups such as the Family Housing Resources/FHR CARES, The Tucson Industrial Development Authority and the Pima Industrial Development Authority are also sponsoring the program.

To learn more about the program, visit EssentialWorkersHousingFund.com.

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