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City of Vancouver, Washington

Communities with approved NRSAs are offered enhanced flexibility in undertaking economic development, housing, and public service activities with their CDBG funds. This flexibility is designed to promote innovative programs in economically disadvantaged areas of the community.

Areas of enhanced regulatory flexibility include:

• Job creation or retention effort focused on the selected neighborhood may be classified as meeting the LMI area benefit national objective requirements.
• Businesses that receive such assistance need not track the specific income of newly hired employees to demonstrate LMI benefit. This provision reduces the administrative burden to the business and is intended to provide an incentive to businesses to participate in the community’s job creation/retention programs.
• Aggregation of housing units for which CDBG funds obligated during each program year and treat them as a single structure. 51 percent of total number of units must be occupied by LMI households. This permits grantees greater flexibility in applying the LMI housing national objective criteria for the housing category.

In turn, grantees have flexibility in providing housing to residents of the NRSA neighborhood.

NOTE: The flexibility to aggregate housing units assisted does not change the requirement that homeownership assistance provided under 570.201(n) must be provided only to LMI households.

• Economic development activities carried out in the NRSA may be excluded from the aggregate public benefit standards. This reduces recordkeeping requirements. This affords greater flexibility in selecting and implementing economic development activities, and reduces the amount and scope of information that grantees must collect and document regarding its programs.

Note, however, that projects are still subject to the individual/project public benefit standards.

• All public services offered within the NRSA and carried out as part of qualified projects under the NRSA by a CBDO are exempt from the public services cap. This permits grantees to offer a more intensive level of services with the approved community, as needed to stimulate revitalization. This flexibility includes job training and other employment related services and as such, it can provide an important foundation for economic opportunity for neighborhood residents. 

Below are the two approved Neighborhood Revitalization Strategy Areas (NRSA) for the City of Vancouver.

Esther Short NRSA

Central Vancouver NRSA