“Now I’m The Landlord”

LaShawn McCoy had been working and saving for seven years to buy her first house. She found a cute two-bedroom on Blake Street. As the closing approached this spring, two problems loomed, one huge, one small: Her credit report came back with a problem. And her son was shot.

Now both are on the mend, the closing was successful, and LaShawn McCoy is celebrating Christmas with her family for the first time in a home of her own, a charming yellow house with a wood paneled living room and black shutters in West Hills.

McCoy’s and three other public-housing renters in the Section 8 program have purchased new homes this year.

They are all graduates of Housing Authority of New Haven (HANH)‘s (aka Elm City Communities’) Family Self Sufficiency (FSS)program. That program signs up motivated HANH renters through a voluntary contract to take classes, set personal goals, and meet with counselors in order to step by step, year by year, to achieve a G.E.D. or other educational goal; to open a business; or to buy a home.

Since 2003, when the program began, about 40 renters have become homeowners, said program Coordinator Maria Carmona. Of these, there has been only one foreclosure. ​“It’s a very successful program,” Carmona reported.

To be eligible, the renter has to be working at least 30 hours a week, be earning at least $22,500 a year, and have been employed a year. Participants take classes in financial literacy, credit management, and the business, practical as well as emotional, sides of how to take care of a house.

Or, as McCoy, who closed on her house in May, put it succinctly during an interview Tuesday morning, ​“Now you’ve got to pay everything. It’s a little scary at the beginning. [As a renter] something goes wrong, you call the landlord. Now I’m the landlord.”

McCoy, who works as the scheduler and administrator for Yale-New Haven Hospital’s liver and kidney transplant unit, learned to be a landlord over the five years she was part of the FSS program. During that time she also built up an escrow account of about $13,000. The money came from a portion of each raise or new income from a new job McCoy received. She regularly attended FSS classes.

Another renter-turned-owner, Takima Saunders, was in the program for only a year when she was ready to buy. That readiness was made possible by savings. ​“The way it works, you’re in the [FSS] program, you meet once a month, and you meet with the credit counselor. I had a decent [credit] score. What he worked on with me was how to save,” she said. ​“I was living paycheck to paycheck.”

Now Saunders, who is a case manager for a welfare-to-work agency in Bridgeport, is the proud owner of an old Colonial with updates, which she bought in move-in condition and closed on Dec. 2.

She said she loves the warm colors she’s painted her interiors: ​“Moroccan brown for the living groom, ginger for my dining room, and the kitchen is purple.”

While not everyone in the program accumulates an escrow account, — as of Nov. 30, Carmona said, she has 16 new families with combined escrow savings of $93,000 — McCoy’s came in handy when the closing approached. Even after having improved her credit dramatically, the lender giving her a mortgage required that one particular debt be paid off before giving the green light. Through the FSS counselors, McCoy did that with some of the escrow funds.

She also was able to arrange a $10,000 grant for the downpayment on the $158,000 house through a program at City Hall’s Livable City Initiative. ​“If I live in the house five years, I don’t have to pay it back,” McCoy noted.

HANH’s subsidizing of homeownership ​“works the same way as subsidizing rent. The calculations are basically the same. The only difference is instead of our sending a portion of the rent assistance to the landlord, we send it to the lender,” said Carmona.

In McCoy’s case, her monthly payment as a homeowner is now less than $920 she was paying as a renter on Bassett Street.

Not only is she paying less while building up wealth; she has also been able to move from a neighborhood where street violence hit her personally: Her 17-year-old son Brennen was shot this spring in a spray of bullets while riding a bike on Read Street. He has recovered and returned to high school. And an older son, Gary, was shot in the same neighborhood seven years ago; he has since recovered and is working in Wallingford.

McCoy’s happy to be in the new quieter, safer neighborhood. On Tuesday morning, her 12-year-old daughter Giana (pictured) paused in the corner of the living room, by the Christmas tree, on the way out to catch her bus to Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School. 

She said compared to the previous digs, she loves the quiet of the new house most of all.