Orange County”™s nationally renowned Farmworker Housing Rehabilitation Program was initially born as a reaction to negative news stories in the media about the state of farm labor housing.
“The program was started in 1992 and it was started because all the bad publicity about farm worker housing in Orange County and other areas of state,” said Vince Poloniak, former director of the Orange County Office of Community Development and architect of the program. “The community asked if there was something they could do to help out.”
That”™s when Poloniak and a former colleague went digging through various federal grant programs to see if any funding was available for farmers to repair or renovate housing.
Orange County”™s program is made available through annual grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Orange County is unique in that it is eligible for a significant amount of HUD funding due to having three cities, Newburgh, Middletown, and Port Jervis, so some of the HUD funding it gets can be set aside for farm housing. Ulster County, for example, also has a large agricultural component, but isn”™t eligible for as much HUD funding since it has one city, Kingston.
Maire Ullrich, resource educator for vegetable crops for the Orange County Cornell Cooperative Extension, is on the advisory board for the grant program.
“Orange County has three cities in the county, which gives us a larger stream of money from HUD for housing improvement,” she said. “The county executive has the ability to direct the money, and since we have a larger amount, some of it is assigned to agricultural programs.”
Under the program, applicant farmers who are owners of rental housing that is occupied by low-income farm workers making less than 80 percent of the county median are offered grants in order to repair and upgrade their units or for new construction of worker housing. The properties must be used to house seasonal or year-round farm workers at rental rates that do not exceed 30 percent of household income.
The county will provide a grant for a maximum of 75 percent of the total cost of the project while the owner must provide a cash match of a minimum of 25 percent of the total cost. The program is a once per year funding cycle with applications available in the fall.
Eligible work includes purchase of manufactured housing, new construction, rectifying health-code and building-code violations, new roofs, windows, heating, plumbing and other construction repairs.
“It was geared at first for smaller projects; we didn”™t do new construction or replacements,” Poloniak said. “After that we modified it, we found that doing small, minor repair and patching wasn”™t solving our problems.”
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Initially, the maximum grant size was $20,000, but it was raised to “a flexible number” to account for necessary home improvements that had to be done, he said.
Farmers who receive the grant money are required to keep their housing up to code as part of the program.
Poloniak, who grew up on an onion farm, was already well known in the county”™s agricultural community at the time the program began.
“I was very active with the agriculture community through other programs,” he said. “Most of the community knew me and had trust in what I was telling them; and that helped out a lot. I come from a farming background, so I always try to help as much as I can.”
As the years went by, news of Orange County”™s innovative program spread and Poloniak became somewhat of a celebrity in agriculture circles.
He received letters and phone calls from local governments in places as far away as California, Michigan and Texas inquiring about the program.
He also received the Outstanding Program Award from the National Association of Counties, and an award from Rural Opportunities Inc., a private, nonprofit regional community development and human-service organization.
“It”™s been a widely recognized program,” Poloniak said.
Thomas Lane, the current director of the county Office of Community Development, credited Poloniak for seeing a “firsthand need” for farm housing help.
“Farmers are being hit with penalties from DOH, there are code and health issues, and in many cases, (farmers) didn”™t have the resources to deal with that,” he said.
With agriculture being such a big part of the county”™s economy, Lane said the program is very important.
“It”™s been very beneficial to farmers in the county,” he said.
Poloniak is glad the program he created has continued to aid farmers with housing repair since its inception nearly 14 years ago.
“With this program, instead of slowly patching, farmers can do the full repair and really address the housing needs,” he said.
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