How to Use CDBG for Brick Sidewalks
As the owner of a shop in a slowly-revitalizing historic neighborhood, you enthusiastically support your fellow-merchants' idea of replacing concrete pavement with more authentic brick sidewalks. One source of funding for your improvement idea may be a federally-issued Community Development Block Grant (CDBG). Awarded on an annual basis to states and agencies within them, CDBGs are aimed at improving residential and commercial conditions for residents of low-income or redeveloping communities. A demanding application process may yield productive results. Does this Spark an idea?
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Things You'll Need
- CDBG agency contact information
- Application schedule and forms
- Census and other neighborhood information
- Funding recipient organization
Instructions
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Locate the government agency responsible for submitting and administering CDBG applications and funding for your area. CDBGs are issued by the federal government through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to state-level housing or economic-development agencies. State-level agencies may administer all projects or may allocate application and administration duties to agencies at the regional, county or city level.
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Call your County Housing and Community Development or Economic Development agency or their state-level counterparts to determine the agency you need to be working with to submit a proposal.
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Obtain the application forms and application schedule you need, either in person or online. Visiting or calling the agency you will be working with lets you establish a contact you may need for guidance or information as the process goes along.
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Review the general priorities set by your state for the year's CDBG. This will, at the best, enable you to focus attention on how your project fits in with the priorities. At the worst, it may help you figure out whether to try to make your project part of a larger, more suitable one or wait till the following year to apply.
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Follow application directions and schedules exactly. CDBG funds are awarded to states competitively. Providing complete narratives, community information, financial estimates and other needed information on schedule is critical to your application being considered for inclusion in your state's application.
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Be prepared to do considerable research on your community and the details of your project, and stand ready to answer last-minute questions as they arise. You are a small part of a large endeavor and being late can mean being dropped.
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Form or locate an organization that can be responsible for any funding you receive. CDBG funds are not given to individuals, businesses or informal volunteer groups. A local community action organization or other group that already has legal nonprofit status qualifies for CDBG funding and may be willing to administer your project. Otherwise, you may need to explore forming a legally-nonprofit organization that can take responsibility for your funding and administrative needs.
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Prepare to wait. You can expect evaluation of your application, bundled with all the others, to take months. Funds are awarded every year, but it may take much of a year's wait to learn whether you will receive an award. You can use waiting time to develop other strategies that enhance your new paving: more historically-accurate signage merchants can afford to pay for or a series of street fairs that will draw additional traffic and, hopefully, business to your area.
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Tips & Warnings
Prepare to reapply. Big projects and organizations with proven program records may squeeze you out, but shifting priorities--and what you have learned through the application process--may mean success in the following year.
Find out if there is a larger project in your area in which your idea fits; paving and lighting to improve security at the hospital in the next block might be extended if your proposal is a good one and includes enhancing safety.
If, on the other hand, major funding is being requested for flood-abatement infrastructure in your neighborhood, requests for brick paving may fall on deaf ears.
Do not leave information out of your application just because it is hard to find; ask local agencies for tips on how to find what you need. If you must derive new information on your own--an estimate of pedestrian traffic to the shops in your area--be prepared to show exactly how you got the information and how reliable it is likely to be.
Attaching the questionnaire you had all neighborhood merchants complete and the one you had merchants on a brick-paved nearby block complete supports your estimate of what paving might do, even though everyone had to do some guessing. Do not just guess to fill an application blank; that can weaken and possibly disqualify your application.
Development agencies note that some good proposals fall by the wayside because their backers fail to figure out the category in which they belong.
References
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