A St. Paul housing complex was the only Minnesota property awarded a first-of-its-kind HUD grant. The money isn’t coming.

Six months ago, representatives from U.S. Housing and Urban Development came to Vista Village, a modest apartment complex on the west side of St. Paul, and presented a ceremonial big check to property owner CommonBond Communities.

The prop check was for $3.8 million. It was awarded as part of the federal Green and Resilient Retrofit Program (GRRP), which was established under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to help distressed affordable housing buildings finance long-deferred maintenance.

Vista Village, a 1972 complex last renovated about 20 years ago, has drafty windows and broken radiators, residents told the Minnesota Star Tribune. CommonBond’s application also noted the need for stormwater drainage, fresh insulation and siding, repair of water-damaged floors and a new fire alarm system.

It was the only project from Minnesota to be awarded any money under the GRRP’s highly competitive grantmaking process. But now the entire program is frozen, on the chopping block of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. CommonBond President Deidre Schmidt has been told that unless something changes, Vista Village’s award would not be forthcoming.

“We haven’t seen any of those funds, and we haven’t received any promise that we would get those funds, and we haven’t received any contract or other formal documentation that normally would follow on an award,” Schmidt said. “None of that typical grantmaking or agreement process is being undertaken.”

The local HUD field office issued a statement to the Minnesota Star Tribune echoing what national publications have been told: “The GRRP program was being reviewed to ensure it was carried out consistent with the housing agency’s core mission to promote affordable housing. The previous administration’s extreme energy-efficiency crusade diverted valuable resources, including funding, from the department’s mission. The Department is evaluating options to ensure rural, tribal and urban communities have the resources they need, which are not solar panels.”

HUD declined to clarify the status of the GRRP and Vista Village grant.

Wanda Flores has lived at Vista Village for 17 years, and has never seen comprehensive improvements done to the property. On Tuesday afternoon, she was using a rag to wipe down the outside of her old windows, which aren’t weatherized well. Her next-door neighbors keep their window barred with a broomstick because it doesn’t shut tightly.

In the winter, it gets really cold, she said, because the radiator doesn’t kick out enough heat, even on full blast.

There are many other problems — a dimly lit parking lot, mailboxes that are easy to break into, stinky carpets that have never been changed as long as she can remember.

“There’s a lot of work to be done,” Flores said. “We’re low-income here, and pay low rent, but we don’t have to live like this.”

Resident Jesse Darby said recent boiler improvements were welcome, but his windows are cracked. When it freezes, ice spreads inside the glass.

Darby has been following news of the federal cuts. He voted for President Donald Trump because he strongly believes immigration should only occur through legal processes. But now, as a resident of HUD-assisted housing, he’s concerned with how federal cuts have been implemented and fears “inflation is just gonna get worse.”

“I don’t even got good hopes of being able to stay here any longer, to be honest, because it’s subsidized,” Darby said. “He wants to cut all them programs too.”

Minnesota’s affordable housing providers initiated a data project last year to survey the breadth of regulated housing and inform legislators and financing agencies.

Tom O’Neil, a private consultant, analyzed nearly 26,000 units across 456 properties and found widespread distress due to the “perfect storm” of recent years’ eviction moratoriums, staffing shortages and increased labor costs, pandemic isolation and increased drug use among tenants, and general societal instability. Using operating statements, O’Neil found many struggling with negative cash flow. Owners of regulated affordable housing can’t freely raise rents.

Halting the GRRP is “a shock to the system,” O’Neil said, because affordable housing providers use federal grants like it to leverage into other funding sources, including private loans.

“And so when you have the federal government say this program is halted, and maybe it will not be funded, it is extremely destructive to the efforts of developers to try to repair their properties,” he said. “They’ll spend many months getting an application ready, lining up the work program, spending money on architects and engineers and others to understand what the repair needs are, so then to have a source of funds that you think is going to be there just all of a sudden pulled away, it’s catastrophic.”

Mary Tingerthal, a former commissioner of the state financing agency Minnesota Housing, said owners of affordable housing operate at narrow margins, leaving little money in the budget for major improvements.

So when the GRRP launched at the peak of the multifaceted crises that walloped housing providers in the pandemic era, developers saw it as an “amazing opportunity” to replace boilers, windows and insulation, said Tingerthal, who now consults on issues facing affordable housing owners.

“Quite frankly, it was less about ‘green’ and a whole lot more about ‘retrofit,‘” she said. “The dollars were going into properties where HUD already had hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. … It seemed like to me like common sense that you would use these new dollars to make sure you are addressing some of the big-ticket maintenance items that these older properties need.”