Just before Christmas break a Tennessee banker asked the superintendents of three Memphis-area school districts to send a letter to the families of students who had streamed into the area in flight from Hurricane Katrina.
The letter offered grants of up to $20,000 for down payments on homes in the area bought with Bank of Bartlett mortgages. The request came from Robert Byrd, the chairman and chief executive of the $451 million-asset bank.
The money will come from the $15 million New Neighbors Hurricane Housing Assistance Fund that the Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati started in September.
In the three weeks since the letter was mailed, Bank of Bartlett has approved mortgage applications for 30 families and made loans to four of them, Mr. Byrd said.
"We thought the best way to find people who would like to permanently relocate to Tennessee is to market to the parents of school children," he said. "We're hoping to get at least 100 families served and make $10 million in loans."
The Home Loan bank set up the fund to help evacuees, mostly people from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama whose homes Katrina destroyed. Carol Mount Peterson, the Home Loan bank's executive vice president of housing and community investment, said that 45,000 evacuees are living in its three-state district - Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Twenty-five thousand of them are in Tennessee.
"Our board of directors were just astounded at the devastation over the Labor Day weekend, when Hurricane Katrina hit, so they decided immediately that they wanted to do something," Ms. Peterson said.
In the weeks just after Katrina, the 12 regional banks that constitute the Federal Home Loan Bank System made a collective donation of more than $1 million to charities providing disaster relief.
But since then, said John von Seggern, the president and chief executive of the Council of Federal Home Loan Banks, the Cincinnati and Dallas Home Loan banks have done the most. "They're the ones that have focused on dealing with long-term housing issues," he said.
The Dallas Home Loan Bank, whose district includes Louisiana and Mississippi, has disbursed $5 million in grants. Some of the money went to help families with low or moderate income rebuild or replace homes and apartments destroyed by Katrina and Rita.
Some went to provide working capital to small businesses affected by the hurricanes. And some went to nonprofits, those that have affordable-housing programs or community development funds or that provide technical assistance to small businesses.
In the Cincinnati district, $750,000 has been granted so far. The down-payment money went to evacuees who got mortgages from member banks on houses worth up to $175,000. The rest went to subsidize affordable rentals - a maximum of $377.43 a month on units whose rent and utilities total no more than 120% of the fair market rent as calculated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Evacuees seeking grants for the down payments can apply until the hurricane assistance fund is empty. Apartment owners can apply for grants quarterly through member institutions.
