Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Home Repair Grants for Seniors

The Housing Services Division of the City's Department of Planning & Development will award $3 million in grants to low-income senior citizens for home repairs as part of their Senior Emergency Home Repair Program. Grants of up to $12,000 are available to low-income seniors aged 65 and older as well as to physically disabled persons aged 55 or older.

There will be a citywide drawing for these grants on Saturday, September 29 at 9 a.m. in the Cobo Conference/Exhibition Center. Seniors need not be present to receive these grants.

These grants can be used for:
  • Furnaces;
  • Plumbing;
  • Roofs;
  • Electrical;
  • Structural; and
  • Building Code Violations.
For more information, please call the Housing Services Division at

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Mail Bag: Warrendale Community Organization

In response to my comments about prostitution in the Warrendale neighborhood, an anonymous reader wrote in to say:
the warrendale community org has to start putting it in high gear..thats the only hope for warrendale...we need a neighborhood news letter to go out to every address..and we need the business community to sponser that...the city and police are not going to help....what happened to the cool "warrendale banners"..on the light posts?...no money?...well start raising the money..get the word out..go door to door...the servive drives look like crap..why doesnt the warrendale org send out their own letters to the houses and business.....why isnt channel 2,4 and 7 contacted to do a "feelgood story"..on a neighborhood struggling?......if the president can dupe the country into spending 2 billion$ a day in iraq...than we can get the residents in warrendale to support....some nice banners and other landscaping....
I agree that the Warrendale Community Organ- ization has the potential to do a lot of great things for our neighbor- hood. The problem, however, is that out of a neighborhood with 9,036 homes there is usually only a dozen or so people who show up at their meetings. In fact, when the WCO did a clean-up of the Southfield Freeway service drive last May, there were more people who came to help out from Macomb County then there were from the Warrendale neighborhood.

Think about that one: folks in Macomb County have absolutely nothing to gain from seeing a portion of the Warrendale neighborhood cleaned up, but there were still more of them helping out than there were folks who live right by it. This is in spite of the fact that flyers were hand-delivered to everyone who lives along the service drive and it was announced repeatedly including on this blog.

Now it's a New Year.

A chance for a gigantic "do-over."

A time to move beyond blaming others.

A time when folks make resolutions and (hopefully) keep them.

With that in mind, please allow me to say this. There won't be a WCO meeting in February because of scheduling problems. The next one will be on Monday, March 5 at 7 p.m. in the Activities Building of Sts. Peter & Paul Church.

I invite and encourage everyone in the neighborhood to stop by. I also invite the dozen or so people who have emailed me privately to say that they used to live in Warrendale and wish us the best to stop by as well. Your input and involvement is welcome even if you no longer call the Warrendale neighborhood home.

If you work the afternoon or evening shift somewhere and can't make it to the meeting, I invite you to send me an email (frank.nemecek [at] gmail.com) and I'll see if I can find a way to get involved that meets your schedule.