Building on the goals within the Wollongong Housing Strategy, Wollongong City Council has tonight endorsed a tender for $5M to Head Start Homes for an affordable rental housing and pathway to home ownership program.
The innovative program will help address the critical need for affordable homeownership in the City of Wollongong.
The program is known as Wollongong Recycling Affordable Housing and Home Ownership Program (WHRAP Round 3). It will provide two services:
- A new affordable rent-to-buy homeownership pathway (known as Equity+) that provides people with affordable rental housing that they can apply to purchase.
- An enhanced empowerment service that will provide financial guidance and support to people to increase their financial capability through supported savings education plans.
This new injection of funding will complement the previous funding Council provided Head Start Homes last year during the Round 2 tender process where they were awarded $1.3M, and a tender to the value of $4.34M that was awarded to the Illawarra Housing Trust in 2019.