IRVINGTON, NJ — Essex County Board of Chosen Freeholders President Britnee Timberlake brought representatives from the Boston Community Capital, a nonprofit community finance and financial services organization, to Irvington on Monday, Dec. 5, to discuss how the bank’s Stabilizing Urban Neighborhoods initiative could help some township homeowners facing mortgage foreclosure stay in their homes.
“We hope that it will be able to provide relief to some struggling homeowners and are appreciative to Mayor (Tony) Vauss and the City Council for partnering with us in this,” Timberlake said Tuesday, Dec. 6.
The Irvington mortgage-assistance workshop for homeowners facing foreclosure was the latest stop for the Timberlake and Boston Community Capital. Timberlake also appeared at an East Orange City Council meeting, along with Jessica Brooks, the senior vice president of Development and Communications for Boston Community Capital, on Monday, Sept. 26.
Timberlake, who runs a nonprofit organization that helps families in need, said she was serving as an intermediary to connect the bank with individuals and elected officials in Essex County who might benefit from the services it provides homeowners eligible for the S.U.N. program.
“There is zero relationship between what I do as my other occupation,” said Timberlake on Monday, Sept. 26, and again on Monday, Dec. 5. “This is just something we came across as the Freeholder Board. The S.U.N. initiative is a nonprofit.”
According to Boston Community Capital officials, “To date, the S.U.N. initiative has helped over 750 families repurchase their homes with new mortgages, reducing their mortgage principal balances by an average of 35 percent.”
“A Newark homeowner recently repurchased his home with a 70-percent reduction in his mortgage principal balance, saving $684 each month with his new S.U.N. loan,” according to Boston Community Capital officials in a press release on the company’s website.
“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, the net effect on affected communities is negative. So when the Great Recession began in 2007-2008 and began the cascade of home mortgage defaults and foreclosures, Boston Community Capital started the 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. You also saw the economic crisis happen, and so folks who might have been able to afford a particular mortgage suddenly couldn’t, because they lost hours at work. So many of the homeowners that we work with are really responsible folks who save their money, who budget very carefully, but who had some kind of catastrophe happen.”
“We said: Wouldn’t it make sense if you could underwrite that homeowner, understand what they could afford to pay and then reach out to the lender and say: ‘Here’s what this property is worth we’ve got someone who’s a buyer who’s willing to pay,’?” asked Brooks. “We purchase the property at the current market value and we sell it back to the homeowner the same day with a mortgage then can afford.”
Brooks said the terms of the new, renegotiated home mortgages are typically 30 years, but those now affordable mortgages can also be renegotiated in the homeowners’ favor at a later date.
“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,” Brooks added.
About the Author
