Woodhaven to repair five houses with City of Columbia grant | Mid-Missouri News

A nonprofit group in Columbia will rehabilitate five houses for people with disabilities after the Columbia City Council authorised a roughly $70,000 grant.

Woodhaven, a nonprofit that assists people with disabilities, plans to improve houses by bettering flooring, showers, bathtubs, kitchen counter tops and cupboards. The grant, which is known as the Community Development Block Grant, will use reallocated funds from the town’s fiscal yr 2023 price range.

Woodhaven CEO Joy Sweeney mentioned the character of housing people with disabilities requires the nonprofit group to improve their houses extra continuously.

“There’s wheelchairs that bang into the walls and are rougher on the flooring than if it was just a family of a couple, two, three people,” Sweeney mentioned.

One of the residents in a house that’s deliberate to be included within the repairs, Karena Miller, can have her bathe changed due to improper water drainage that lets water into her hooked up bed room.

“It doesn’t flood it, per se, but water seeps in here,” she mentioned. “And then we’re like, ‘What’s this water doing in here?'”

The tasks additionally embody ending a downstairs area in a single of the five houses scheduled for upgrades, which can permit Woodhaven to add housing for another particular person.

“We need to put a basement bedroom in that property so that they have access, as well as a nice place to rest their heads,” Sweeney mentioned.

Woodhaven presently has 43 properties throughout Columbia with about 95 residents in these houses.

Sweeney mentioned the leftover cash from 2023 was not utilized by different organizations, so the town offered the cash to Woodhaven. As half of the situations of the grant, all repairs to the houses should be accomplished by March 31, 2027.

Woodhaven has already acquired bids for the tasks and expects to full the enhancements by the top of this yr.