East Orange 4th Ward Councilman Casim Gomez, center, stands with, from left, Jennifer Angarita and Jessica Brooks, the senior vice president of Development and Communications for Boston Community Capital, on Monday, Sept. 26, at the East Orange City Council’s regularly scheduled meeting. Gomez invited Essex County Board of Chosen Freeholders President Britnee Timberlake to bring Brooks and Angarita to the meeting to inform the governing body about their new S.U.N. program, which helps struggling homeowners stay in their homes by buying their delinquent mortgages from the lenders that own them and reselling them to homeowners at reduced and renegotiated rates.
EAST ORANGE, NJ — East Orange 4th Ward Councilman Casim Gomez’s personal history of home mortgage foreclosure led to him invite Essex County Freeholder President Britnee Timberlake to the City Council’s regularly scheduled meeting Monday, Sept. 26, to discuss finance and banking reform. Timberlake brought along Jessica Brooks, the senior vice president of Development and Communications for Boston Community Capital, a nonprofit financial management company that aims to help homeowners struggling to stave off home mortgage foreclosure.
“My family and I went through a foreclosure,” said Gomez on Monday, Sept. 26. “It was one of the worst experiences of my life. Nobody should have to go through that.”
Timberlake, who also runs a nonprofit organization that helps families in need, said bringing Boston Community Capital to the council meeting to connect the organization with people who might benefit from its Stabilizing Urban Neighborhoods initiative.
“There is zero relationship between what I do as my other occupation,” said Timberlake on Monday, Sept. 26. “This is just something we came across as the freeholder board. The S.U.N. initiative is a nonprofit.”
“The S.U.N. initiative is a foreclosure-relief initiative that Boston Community Capital launched about six years ago, in response to the foreclosure crisis,” Brooks said Monday, Sept. 26. “We were concerned about the impact foreclosures were having, not just on individual families, but on neighborhoods and communities, because when a foreclosure happens in a neighborhood, it affects the individual homeowner that’s going through that foreclosure, but it also affects the entire family — the kids who might have to go out of school, and it affects their community, because property values go down. If a home becomes vacant, you could end up with those vacant buildings becoming magnets for crime and just contributing to the overall instability of that community, which ends up costing the municipalities and ends up costing the community, in terms of equity.”
Foreclosures have a “ripple effect,” Brooks said, and, more often than not, this is negative. So when the Great Recession hit in 2008 and set in motion the mortgage defaults and foreclosures that have affected millions, Boston Community Capital began their S.U.N. initiative.
“Boston Community Capital is 30-year-old nonprofit. We’re a community development financial institution that spent 30 years investing in affordable housing, in child care, in schools and in community health centers — all the things that it takes to build neighborhood stability,” said Brooks. “And when we saw the foreclosure crisis happening in 2008, 2009, 2010, we saw its potential to really take down all those accomplishments that we had all worked so hard to achieve through the years.
Brooks said this was how the S.U.N. initiative took root.
“We purchase the property at the current market value and we sell it back to the homeowner the same day with a mortgage they can afford.”
The terms of the new, renegotiated home mortgages are typically 30 years, but those can also be renegotiated in the homeowners’ favor at a later date, she said
“We’re a nonprofit organization; we’re mission-focused and mission-driven,” Brooks said. “There’s a way to use money based on your values, as opposed to just using it for something else, and that’s really what we’re trying to do. Our focus at the end of the day is keeping folks in their homes. We’re trying to do it in a sustainable way. We borrowed this money from investors. We pay them a fixed rate of interest and then we lend to homeowners at slightly more than that. We’re in it for the long haul.
“We’re going back to that community-banking role — the notion of, you lend money to people who can afford to pay it back. We’re doing 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. We really plan on getting paid back by our borrowers, so we’re not going to do any bad loans. We’re investing in people.”
Gomez and several of his council colleagues at the meeting said Brooks’ explanation sounded like a viable plan.
To learn more about the S.U.N. initiative program, visit www.bostoncommunitycapital.org.
Freeholder, bank v.p. discuss initiative to stave off foreclosures added by Chris Sykes on
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