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About Us | Accomplishments | Board of Directors | Staff | Mission | Who We Serve |
The Neighborhood of Affordable Housing (NOAH) has entered its twentieth year as a multi-service non-profit community development corporation (CDC). It was organized as a Chapter 180, 501 (c) 3 non-profit in 1987, and began serving East Boston in 1987 as a two-person organization operating from the basement of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. The early faith-based founders were members of the East Boston Ecumenical Council. NOAH now serves the greater Boston region through to Interstate Route 495. While both original employees remain, our organizational capacity has grown, and NOAH has eighteen adult staff members and eleven youth interns governed by a multi-cultural thirteen-member Board of Directors. While our business lines and initiatives have multiplied, our original goals remain the nucleus of our work: creating and preserving affordable housing opportunities and building safe and healthy neighborhoods for those most in need and others challenged by today’s housing market.
During the past two decades, East Boston has become increasingly diverse, with many new arrivals from Asia, Eastern Europe, and most of all, from Latin America. The population is now comprised of over 50% minority families; and 42% of all residents are new immigrants. Some 20% of the population lives in poverty. NOAH's clientele - in East Boston and elsewhere within the Greater Boston area, including the North and South Shores and MetroWest - is comprised of disadvantaged low-income and moderate-income families. NOAH works towards achieving the National Housing Goal of “a decent home and suitable living environment” for as many underprivileged individuals as it can, both locally and regionally. We look to achieve this through an increasing number of social and environmental benefit programs: counseling families on buying and renting affordable homes and on avoiding foreclosure, building and redeveloping properties into affordable homes, maintaining our own rental housing property portfolio, helping the elderly and handicapped with low-cost home repairs, focusing on affordable rental preservation initiatives, and developing significant environmental and neighborhood restoration programs.
A number of years ago, NOAH's Board made the decision to extend the services of our non-profit into the suburbs. Many young people were leaving these towns, and the state, for less expensive regions; and the lack of reasonably priced housing was often sited as one of the major factors. Police, fire, DPW workers, teachers and many others find it hard to live within the towns in which they work. For those of low- to moderate-incomes, it can be challenging to remain in their hometowns due to the lack of affordable housing in these communities. Accordingly, NOAH has extended its reach, offering to partner with municipalities that do not have the services of another non-profit CDC organization. In Holliston currently, NOAH and a development partner have in the pre-development “affordable pipeline” a 30-unit rental complex behind the Town Hall (Cutler Heights) and a 16-unit condominium rehabilitation development at the former Andrews School. In addition, we have purchased a vacant nursing home on property in North Andover (the old Greenery site) and plan to develop 42 rental units there. Several other development projects are also in the planning stages.
NOAH has cultivated a strong track record over the past twenty years. When it comes to creating homeownership opportunities, over 650 families now own their first home due to NOAH's new homeownership counseling efforts; and we have held homebuyer workshops for thousands of individuals since the mid-1990’s. NOAH has developed 219 first time homebuyer units. We have helped more than two thousand, five hundred senior and disabled homeowners remain securely in their own homes by completing over six thousand safety related, emergency, and handicapped accessibility repairs over the years. In addition, we have located affordable rental housing for over fifteen hundred Boston families through our rental counseling efforts.
NOAH has rehabilitated, owns and rents 103 affordable units in over 17 properties in East Boston, Everett and Beverly; 20% of which are dedicated to the homeless. We fully restored Trinity House in 1993 for use as a single room occupancy shelter. This lovely building is 150 years old, and on the National Register of Historic Places. Within East Boston we have completed two condominium developments during the past year, which have been made available to 19 first-time homebuyer families. Historically, NOAH has been a state leader in the “One-to-Four Family” program. In the 1990’s, Lilly Endowment chose us to receive a “Partners in Community-Based Development” grant award; and we have been named a “Business of the Year” by the Chamber of Commerce.
In East Boston, open space and environmental restitution are critical priorities. Logan Airport consumes two-thirds of the land mass, and its extensive development resulted in the destruction of Wood Island Park, designed by noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. It is the fifth most polluted community in the State; and borders the Chelsea Creek (actually a river) which is the second most contaminated body of water in Massachusetts. The Chelsea Creek, as well as its shoreline, is now involved in restoration efforts by NOAH and its collaborating organization in the Chelsea Creek Action Group; and we have performed work in salt marsh restoration; oil spill mitigation; Brownfields “clean up” projects; air, land and water pollution remediation; and more. With NOAH's assistance and resident collaboration, East Boston now has six attractively redeveloped school yards, a four and a half acre waterfront “Urban Wild” park, and a youth-run community garden. Through NOAH's partnership in Nuestra Voz Cuenta, some 150 newly enrolled voters have been created. Because of NOAH’s social services programming, there is a new East Boston youth soccer initiative; an ongoing seven-week Summer School Yard program serving over 200 disadvantaged elementary schoolchildren each year; and scores of inhabitants, including young people, have become trained as community leaders. Our own E3C high school interns were the only youth to present at last year’s ‘Environmental Justice in America’ Conference in Washington D.C. Over a hundred foreign-born inhabitants have learned basic English skills through NOAH’s two year old English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) program.
NOAH, the Neighborhood of Affordable Housing, is an East Boston based community development corporation structured to collaborate with and support residents and communities in their pursuit of affordable housing strategies, environmental justice, community planning, leadership development, and economic development opportunities.
NOAH eagerly partners with those residents, neighborhood entities, municipalities or groups that share similar values and goals in order to improve standards of living, build community, and create social/economic opportunities, especially for low and moderate-income persons, families and disadvantaged groups or areas.
NOAH's goals and programs are built on a commitment to equality, fairness, diversity and respect for all people.
NOAH’s target populations and main constituencies are primarily low- to moderate-income people and families, often with diverse languages and cultures. NOAH offers educational and counseling programs to make homeownership affordable in a service area of over 300,000 people. In addition to East Boston, this expanded area encompasses most of Allston-Brighton, the Fenway, the South End, the North End, Chinatown, Charlestown, South Boston, and parts of Revere. Collectively, these neighborhoods have a poverty rate of 21 percent, and median income is 76 percent of the median for Massachusetts overall. These programs include first-time homeowners counseling and education, senior homeowner counseling and education, rental housing counseling, foreclosure prevention and mitigation, and more. In the area of foreclosure education, NOAH handles clients from throughout the North Shore, as well. In the area of affordable housing developement, our organization serves the entire greater Boston region, through to and including the municipalities bordering Route 495.
In its initial target community and home-base, East Boston, 42% of residents are foreign-born, and some 60% of these have entered the United States after 1990. The Latino community, in particular, has seen well over a 158% increase since that year. Nearly 40% of the population speaks only Spanish at home; and 22.7% of the population is considered to be linguistically isolated. Over 20% of families in East Boston live below the poverty level.
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