Rural IDA Program Successes Reported
Housing Assistance Council:
IDA programs match low-income individuals' savings to enable them to reach specific goals.
For this pilot program, participating families used their savings to buy homes or to improve homes they already owned.
"IDAs help people to help themselves," explained Moises Loza, the executive director of the Housing Assistance Council, a national nonprofit organization that conducted the recent pilot program as part of its mission to improve housing for low-income rural Americans.
HAC today released a report on the pilot program and other rural IDAs.
Families participating in IDAs save their own money, sometimes as little as a few dollars a month, and a foundation or government agency matches their savings.
Many of the New Mexico and Texas families are headed by single women and all of them live in colonias, small communities near the U.S.-Mexico border.
Local nonprofits administered the pilot in each of the colonias involved: Azteca Community Loan Fund in San Juan, Texas, the Community Development Corporation of South Texas in McAllen, Texas, and Tierra del Sol in San Miguel, N.M.
Most of them did not have bank accounts until their IDA accounts were set up at local branches.
HAC's research report, Designing and Implementing Rural Individual Development Account Programs, describes the colonias program and two others in detail, along with numerous strategies and recommendations for rural IDA programs.
