Community Ventures Breaks Ground on Rural Housing Trust Fund Houses

FRANKFORT, Kentucky — Kentucky Housing Corporation (KHC) joined officials from Community Ventures and the city of Fulton yesterday to celebrate the construction of the first house being built in Western Kentucky with support from the Rural Housing Trust Fund.

“We greatly value our partnership with Community Ventures,” said Curtis Stauffer, KHC’s managing director of Housing Contract Administration, “and are so pleased that they have built such a strong partnership with Fulton County and the city of Fulton, demonstrating broad community support in meeting the residents’ needs. We are proud to support their work in this region through the Rural Housing Trust Fund. It is the work of partners like these that enable us to move closer to our vision of a Kentucky where all families and individuals can live in quality housing they can afford.”

The homes in Fulton are being built with Structurally Insulated Panels (SIPs), a relatively new technology. The floor, roof, and walls, including insulation, are built in a factory and shipped to the construction site, where they can be erected in as little as two days. This Community Ventures development, funded with Rural Housing Trust Fund dollars, not only adds much-needed stock to the housing supply but, because of the innovative approach, does so more quickly than would be possible with traditional construction methods.

Community Ventures was one of nine nonprofit housing agencies awarded $13.5 million in RHTF dollars in October 2023 to aid in the recovery from the 2021 tornadoes that struck Western Kentucky and the 2022 flooding that impacted Eastern Kentucky. It received $2,596,322 to build houses in Fulton and Graves counties.

Kentucky Housing Corporation, the state housing finance agency, was created by the 1972 General Assembly to provide affordable housing opportunities.  As a self-supporting, public corporation, Kentucky Housing offers down payment assistance loans to assist first-time homebuyers obtain home mortgages, housing production financing, homeownership education/counseling, rental assistance, housing rehabilitation, and supportive housing programs for special needs populations.