nothin City Homebuyers Get Downpayment Help | New Haven Independent

City Homebuyers Get Downpayment Help

Allan Appel Photo

Paley and first-time home buyer McKoy.

If, like Kym McCoy (pictured), you are a first-time home-buyer with an eligible income but struggling with assembling the moolah for the downpayment, help may be on the way.

Wednesday morning, Wells Fargo Bank announced a $4.7 million pot of downpayment money for first-time home buyers in New Haven, West Haven, and East Haven.

McCoy joined with bank, government and neighborhood officials for the announcement on Lilac Street in Newhallville.

The money, in a program the bank calls HomeLIFT, will available to people who are income eligible — earning no more than 120 percent of area median income, or about $70,000 for an individual and $100,000 for a family of four — said Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS) Managing Director of Home Ownership Bridgette P. Russell.

The money comes from Wells Fargo, but the bank is counting on local not-for-profits like NHS to process potential buyers, enroll them in a required homebuyer preparation program, as McKoy has done through NHS, and then take them through the first step of a pre-approved mortgage arrangement with a lender.

McKoy has a pre-approval letter from First Niagara Bank. She will take that letter to a Wells Fargo open house being held at the Omni Hotel on Aug. 28 and 29, when the bank hopes fill the 219 dow payment grants. If you walk in without a pre-approval letter but qualify, naturally Wells Fargo will be interested in being your bank.

If you stay in the single-family house, condo, or multi-family you buy (up to four-family), and as long as it’s your primary residence for five years, the loan is forgiven; 20 percent is forgiven each year, with no interest

The spiffy kitchen leads out to a spacious yard with a dozen newly planted trees.

Taking the grant from Wells Fargo does not disqualify you from applying to Livable City Initiative’s home buyer assistance or other available programs. Russell called that kind of layering” acceptable, if you qualify.

Russell and Joe Kirk, Wells Fargo’s regional community banker, urged the press to alert folks to register in advance to talk to the Wells Fargo staff about one of the grants.

To do that you go either to the bank’s site; or you can go to Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven’s site, where you will be re-directed, said Russell.

But you’d better move quickly; Russell said many people are already pre-registered for the Omni Wells Fargo roll-out. And at her own NHS homeownership training sessions she has about 800 people waiting.

McKoy flanked by John Lewis, representing the mayor’s office in West Haven, and Wells Fargo’s Kirk.

McCoy is hoping to access a $15,000 grant to purchase 11 Lilac St. She has already reserved” purchase of 11 Lilac — it’s next door to where her mom now lives — through her association with NHS’s homebuyers’ training program, which rehabbed the attractive, two-porched 1872 single-family.

Click here for a previous story about McCoy, the house, and the Lilac Street neighborhood, where she grew up, and which is experiencing a rebound thanks to a resurgence of single home ownership spearheaded by the efforts of NHS.

This is significant,” Russell said of the program, mainly because the area median income eligibility is higher in HomeLIFT than other programs, meaning people who are perhaps ineligible for not being poor enough might be able to get in on this one.

If the mortgage comes through for McKoy, who works as a teacher at Achievement First, with the $15,000 downpayment help, her monthly total payment would be about $900, estimated Russell.

In new kitchen with the mayor and LCI’s Linda Davis-Cannon (in back), with kids of the two-week old Newhallville Management Team’s community clean up squad.

Likely the biggest issue for new home buyers is assembling the capital for the down payment, she added. That’s because with rents in New Haven so demanding — often in the $1,100 to $1,500 range, or 30 to at times 50 percent of monthly income for people she deals with — there is little ability to save for a significant downpayment.

McKoy said she’s nervous but excited. She credited NHS with taking her through the steps, especially the technical business of inspection and appraisal of the property. She hopes to close on Sept. 17.

NHS Executive Director Jim Paley praised the program as not only helping 219 new buyers, but also helping NHS’s programs of community revitalization: Getting buyers, with a stake in the community, into NHS’s re-habbed homes faster enables the organization to move on to the next project and the next.

You are permitted to have owned a house before, officials clarified. You simply cannot be an owner at the time of your application.

Joe Kirk said the bank’s HomeLIFT program has already had 10,000 participate in what he termed 38 markets across the country.

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