Sanford Housing Authority is a public housing agency that helps provide decent and safe rental housing for eligible low-income families, the elderly, and persons with disabilities. Sanford Housing Authority manages several funded programs and has a total of 60 subsidized affordable housing units for rental assistance. Sanford Housing Authority administered a total of 50 Section 8 Vouchers. Sanford Housing Authority currently has low rent units and Section 8 Voucher as its program type. Sanford Housing Authority is located at 114 Emery Street, Sanford, ME, 04073 and serves the city of Sanford. Income limits, fair market rents and rent rates vary with each agency. Please contact Sanford Housing Authority at, (207) 324-6747 for more information about coverage area and program availability.

Sanford Housing Authority serves Sanford, Springvale and the surrounding towns of Alfred, Kennebunk, Lebanon, North Berwick, Wells, Shapleigh and Acton.

The SHA helps address the housing needs of over 800 families living in Sanford/Springvale. Families must have incomes at or below 80% of the area median income in order to qualify for our housing programs.

Our waiting list of families who qualify for assistance, but who are not currently being served, is in excess of 1000 applicants. This means that there could be over a three-year wait before an applicant receives housing assistance from our agency.

The Sanford Housing Authority's strengths is the superb Maintenance Department and excellent Housing Division. It is the dedication and hard work of the staff in these divisions that maintains our reputation as a responsible and credible apartment owner in Sanford/Springvale.

The Maintenance Department has performed in excess of $5,000,000 in rehabilitation to our properties in the past ten years. This work has consisted of installing all new doors, cabinets and replacement windows in our family development, installing replacement windows in our eight-story high rise, completely gutting and retrofitting four apartments for handicap accessibility, and refurbishing all of the remaining apartments at Sunset Tower.

The Housing Division has evolved into a group of managers who are competent, consistent and informed. They have received all the necessary training in the regulatory and procedural requirements of the federal subsidy programs including low-income housing tax credits that the SHA operates. We have evolved and established procedures and policies that help guide our management practices in a way that allows residents to have clear knowledge of our expectations of them and they of us. In my somewhat biased opinion, we are the most professional property management organization in York County.

The primary objective of the Sanford Housing Authority is to provide housing assistance to residents in our jurisdiction. This assistance takes the form of direct federal programs that financially assist in paying rent for family and individuals, and also takes the form of the advocating for and the promotion of more affordable housing in our community.

Historically, the method by which the SHA addressed these objectives was by applying for federal housing programs that either; built developments or provided rental assistance in privately owned apartments in the community. The decline of funding for these more traditional approaches to the affordable housing needs has resulted in a reassessment of the methods that the SHA will pursue in providing these badly needed housing resources.

We have recognized that housing is only one of many problems this our communities face and that there are many other governmental and social agencies in our community, which try to assist with those problems. By promoting better and consistent communications with these other providers, the SHA has good information as to what these other groups do and how we may assist them (and they us) in being more efficient with our resources. This, in turn, has led to many cooperative ventures between agencies like the York County Community Action Program, York County Head-Start, the Caring Unlimited Program, York County United Way, and Goodall Hospital. The SHA has learned that since there is no longer a "recipe" for obtaining federal housing resources, we must be more inventive and open in our approaches to local production of affordable housing and the partnerships formed to do so.