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Homes Within Reach in the News ... Last update: January 16, 2007 – 9:20 AM Kelly Anderson got her
best Christmas gift ever on Dec. 19. Kelly Anderson got her best Christmas gift ever on Dec. 19, a house.
"I'd been trying to buy a home for years," says the 29-year-old single mom and office manager. She'd gone to homebuyers' classes and dreamed of a place for herself and her three children, ages 7, 3 and 10 weeks.
Homes Within Reach buys and builds houses and then sells them to eligible buyers at well below market prices for similar properties. It's able to do so by holding onto the title to the land and selling only the house itself.
"For what I could
qualify for, I could afford maybe a townhouse -- at the very most," Anderson
says. And even that would have been a stretch, she says, because it would have
cost about $190,000. "I would have really had to push Now, she has more space,
plus a yard, for her children, and in a "perfect location" -- right across the
street from an elementary school. "I've been blessed," she
says. Homes Within Reach plans
to make at least 16 more families happy homeowners during the coming year, and
it's conducting informational meetings across the west metro now to find
would-be buyers. To qualify, a family
must have a gross income of less than 80 percent of metro Hennepin County's
average household income, based on family size. A family of four with a gross
income of $59,600 would qualify, says Doris Gruis, project Gruis says the homes that will be available this year are in places like Minnetonka, Eden Prairie, Edina, St. Louis Park and Golden Valley. More than half will be brand-new homes.
After making initial
contact with Gruis and learning that she was eligible for the program, she spent
more than a year getting her finances and credit in order so she could get bank
approval on a loan. Then in October she made
her move. "Literally, I did the application [with Homes Within Reach], and I got
a response within a day." She submitted her application to a bank and was
approved for a loan within a couple more days. "Not a week later, I
picked out the house," she says, and "it's beautiful. ... This house is amazing
-- two fireplaces and a two-car garage. We even saw three deer walk across our
yard the other day." It's a dream come true
for the Mankato native and her family. "When my mother first visited the house,
she left crying, she was so proud of me. And she was kind of feeling sad, too,
that she was not able to do that for me when I was a Last year, Anderson had
experienced some of those same emotions when her son had written a letter to
Santa saying he wanted a house for his family. "My motivation was to get these
kids a house as soon as possible," she says. This Christmas, she
succeeded. Contact the writer at
612-673-7840 or at sbarnes@startribune.com. |
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5101 Thimsen Avenue, Suite 200 Tel 952-401-7071 Minnetonka, MN 55345 Fax 952-224-2857 Last modified: 08/14/07 |