Displaced Flood Victims Can Get Help With Mortgage & Rent Payments

Help is now available for people who were displaced by the Father’s Day Flood to help pay mortgage and rent payments.

The Upper Peninsula Association of REALTORS, in conjunction with the Michigan REALTORS and the National Association of REALTORS, have a received a grant for $50,000 for qualified applicants.

UP Realtors President Christopher Germain said the money should provide a little financial relief to those most impacted by the storm.  “It will help pay a mortgage payment if they were a homeowner that had experience either major damage or loss and it will also help if you were displaced into a rental. It can pay some rental monies or if you were in a rental and you had to be displaced to another rental,” Germain said.

Relief assistance is limited to a maximum of $1,000 per applicant per household.

Ripley resident Bethany Jones estimates that her property suffered about $340,000 worth of damage and their claim was immediately denied by their insurance company.

So even though their house is uninhabitable, they still have to pay for it.  “We have a first and a second mortgage on this property that we have to pay. We have taxes that we have to pay. None of that goes away just because it is uninhabitable, which was actually one of the very early, more frustrating things to realize is, even though we can’t live here, I still have to pay that mortgage and banks can’t really do anything about that,” said Jones.

Applications can be downloaded by going to www.upar.org and clicking on Relief Assistance Application.

Completed applications can be mailed to the Upper Peninsula REALTORS at 326 N. Front Street, Marquette, MI 49855 or emailed to upar@upar.org.

Applications are due by September 15th.

Jones said, “What does a $1,000 do for us? It buys us one more month of a little bit of relief and we’ll take it and be completely thankful for it.”