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DSHA concludes Home Sweet Home for the Holidays program

Delaware State Housing Authority offered financial assistance to home-buyers with its Home Sweet Home for the Holiday program.

The program helped close to 40 Delaware families buy new homes ahead of the holidays and loaned $10 thousand for down payment and closing costs to each family. DSHA also allocated $75 million for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages.

DSHA director of public relations Laurie Stovall said Home Sweet Home was a special program because it offered a forgivable loan if the family stays in the home for ten years.

Each year the families live in the home, that loan goes down by 10%, until the tenth year, when the loan is forgiven.

“We know that no Delawarean is the same,” Stovall said. “Everyone has different circumstances, has had different life challenges, different life successes and we want to make sure that we are available and able to help all of them.”

Home Sweet Home was a temporary program, and it follows in a line of other DSHA efforts to help aspiring homeowners with initial costs.

Stovall said assisting home-buyers with upfront costs has been top of mind for decades.

“It's hard for a person – a teacher, a firefighter, a nurse – to come up with that down payment. So, that is where we focus our efforts, to helping potential home buyers find upfront costs so that they can get into the home of their dreams.”

There are several other programs under DSHA that people can take advantage of, including its homeownership program Kiss Your Landlord Goodbye.

With degrees in journalism and women’s and gender studies, Abigail Lee aims for her work to be informed and inspired by both.

She is especially interested in rural journalism and social justice stories, which came from her time with NPR-affiliate KBIA at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo.

She speaks English and Russian fluently, some French, and very little Spanish (for now!)