A state award received by the assistant city manager in Dowagiac is highlighting efforts in that community to help residents improve their homes.
Assistant City Manager Amanda Sleigh was given the Michigan State Housing Development Authority’s Individual Impact Award this month in recognition of her leadership in the area of housing development. Dowagiac City Manager Kevin Anderson tells us there are multiple state programs that award home repair funds to communities, and Sleigh runs those efforts locally.
“What they do is they focus on houses that need new roofs, new facades, new windows, energy efficiencies,” Anderson said. “And so we’re able to take monies — and they’re fairly substantial amounts — that can go into houses in older neighborhoods and give a facelift to them, give energy conservation to them.”
Anderson says Sleigh deserves the recognition for running these programs locally.
“Certainly, we’ve thought she’s been doing a really good job on that for a number of years. It is really nice to see state confirmation or outside confirmation that, in fact, that is what’s taking place.”
For her part, Sleigh tells us the city started its home rehab program using state dollars in 2019, and since she started working for the city in 2022, the amount of funding awarded to Dowagiac for that purpose has continually grown.
“The first year I was here, we received $70,000 that year,” Sleigh said. “That helped us with about seven homes or so, but the most recent program that we are just finishing was a $450,000 grant that allowed us to help 19 homes in the community.”
Sleigh says the city maintains a list of applicants, and when funding comes up, it contacts those who are eligible and on the list. Anyone interested should just call. And she says the homeowners who have been helped through these various funding channels are grateful.
What do they tell her?
“‘We wouldn’t have been able to do this without you. Thank you so much for all your help.’ And the city of Dowagiac goes kind of a step above what some other agencies do, where we actually guide the homeowners through the whole process. We will write bid specs. We will call contractors and collect all the quotes.”
Sleigh says it’s been satisfying to see the difference this program has made in neighborhoods.
“I tour the houses that we’ve done work on quite often, and I am driving around town all the time, and it’s fun to see a house that we worked on and have their neighbor come in and maybe put in some new windows or paint the exterior, fix up their front porch. You can definitely see a catalyst of activities in the neighborhoods after we do a project.”
Since 2022, the city of Dowagiac has secured nearly $1.6 million in housing rehabilitation grants, repairing more than 30 homes. Much of that funding comes to the state through the federal government via services like the Community Development Block Grant program.