Mayors’ conference awards city a grant for affordable housing

The city of Austin and the Housing Conservancy are the lucky recipients of a 2019 Outstanding Achievement Metropolitan City CommunityWINS Grant, which was presented to Mayor Steve Adler at the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Hawaii. The $100,000 grant, which was sponsored by Wells Fargo, will help preserve affordable housing for working families through the Austin Housing Conservancy Fund, a private equity fund managed by the nonprofit Affordable Central Texas. The grant will help push the Fund closer to its 10-year goal of preserving 10,000 units of rental housing for 15,000 Austinites. “We must preserve multifamily rental housing for middle-class families or we will lose the diversity of people and cultures and the artistic and creative talent that make our city special,” Mayor Adler said in a statement announcing the grant. “The loss of affordable housing supply in Austin that has come with our growth hits our teachers, medical workers, first responders, artists, musicians and other such workers hardest.”