The Register Star is a Joke

We were pretty heavily involved in helping a local hospital provide downpayment assistance to one of their employees. I learned my first lesson in dealing with the media...they really don't give a rip. When I sent an email to the paper because they had our organization's name wrong in the original online article, they didn't fix it. They deleted it. Now I know why I don't subscribe to the paper. They put a picture of our housing counselor on the front page of the Local section, and still didn't mention us at all in the print article. Pathetic. The news story should have been so much larger than it was.

The employer assistance from the State of Illinois is available to any employer in the state. Not only that, but the employer gets tax credits to help offset the cost. Even in the case in the article, the hospital will get $2,500 in tax credits. (Since the hospital is a non-profit, they can sell those credits for about 80 cents on the dollar...a for profit company can apply the credits to their state tax liability.) Not only that, but the employee receives homebuyer education, which has been shown to lower delinquency by nearly 40% when given by a non-profit like our organization.

The hospital did a great job, the State did a great job (IHDA), and Housing Action Illinois really pulled it all together. All in all, it was pretty painless to pull the state funding into the deal, and it helps offset the hospital's cost, improves the overall situation while adding a lot of additional downpayment assistance for the employee. It's a win-win-win-win situation!