Buying a home was exhausting for Cedric Jones.
He constantly had to decipher legalese, shop around for various loans, apply to those loans, verify real estate agents’ claims and still, in the end, would lose out to another buyer with more cash on hand.
“It was like fighting a war,” the 56-year-old said.
After finishing a 12-hour shift on Monday, the longtime insurance adjuster held his 2-year-old pup, Roscoe, in one hand and a freshly cracked-open Dos Equis beer in the other as he reflected on his battle to find and purchase a home over the past two years.
“It feels like a lot of people tell you one thing and somebody else will tell you another, and then you’re like, ‘Wait a minute. Somethin’ don’t sound right,’” Jones said. “Then you have to find someone you trust that knows.”
Jones found support through LISC, Houston’s branch of the national Local Initiatives Support Corporation.
The nonprofit focuses on solving the housing crisis by allocating resources to Houstonians like Jones through its Own the HOU initiative.
The program is made up of a coalition of local nonprofits, the city of Houston and Harris County, supported by a $7.5 million grant from Wells Fargo to place 5,000 Houstonians of color into new homes by 2026.
Laura Jaramillo, Houston LISC’s executive director, said the initiative has helped over 2,300 residents move into new homes or keep their current properties.
“A ZIP code shouldn’t determine our lives,” she added.
What is Own the HOU?
Clare Boulet, deputy director of Houston LISC, explained that the initiative has five main objectives: educating and connecting Houstonians to knowledgeable experts, improving credit and savings, increasing supply, preserving previous homeownership and expanding access.
“We want to get the word out, make it easier for people to access homeownership, expand the type of housing built, help people stay in their homes and tackle systematic barriers like minimum wage, credit score and school loan debt,” Boulet said.
The initiative is not directly a down payment assistance program. While some of those $7.5 million dollars may assist potential new homebuyers with down payments, most of the money is funneled into a wide variety of housing programs.
“We made a pretty concerted effort early on,” she said. “If we only used these dollars for down payment assistance it would only help a small percentage of the people we were trying to help.”
In addition to assisting Houstonians like Jones become homeowners, LISC also helps folks manage tangled titles.
This is a situation where someone owns part or all of a property but their name is not reflected on the deed, or the legal document that transfers ownership from seller to buyer, Boulet said.
“I first heard about it after Hurricane Harvey,” the deputy director said. “A lot of low-income homeowners couldn’t access repair support (from insurance companies or FEMA) because of the tangled title issue.”
Boulet directs any anyone interested in homeownership to visit the Own the HOU website and peruse the education courses available that walk a potential homebuyer through the process as well as accessing a dedicated page of resources that help residents find a real estate agent, assess their financial situation and even assist in home inspection and appraisal.
“These dollars have allowed us to hit the ground running,” Boulet said. “Over the next couple of years we expect our five strategies to become more active.”
An initiative’s impact
Jones used to live in a cramped apartment complex in Kashmere Gardens where his neighbor’s kid woke him up like clockwork every day at 4 a.m.
“I swear to God, every day her child would wake up and scream at the top of his lungs and just sit there and she would just let him holler,” Jones said.
The journey from paper-thin walls to a three-bed and two-bath was long.
Jones sought help from the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation, a local nonprofit that receives funding from Own the HOU.
From there, Jones signed up and attended an eight-hour class that prepared him for the battalion of paperwork and red tape ahead. He was also assigned a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development counselor he consulted with throughout the process.
With help from his counselor, a $10,000 down payment and a great deal of patience, Jones and his wife closed on a 1,900-square-foot home in Spring on Oct. 31.
“The thing that sold me was the trees,” Jones said. “All shade, no pine trees nothin’ but big oak trees. It’s just peace and quiet. It’s serenity.”
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