BY JOYCE BLAY
Staff Writer
A home of one’s own builds lives as well as neighborhoods. That is the belief of housing and jobs advocate Michael McNeil, who asked the Lakewood Township Committee in October for land on which to build 25 single-family homes. At a meeting earlier this month, Mayor Charles Cunliffe announced that officials would grant McNeil’s request.
McNeil and co-chair Glen Bradford head Solutions To End Poverty Soon (STEPS), a statewide nonprofit organization advocating jobs for members of minority communities and affordable housing.
Homes for All in Toms River will build the project on two parcels of land off Oak Street that total 8 acres — enough land to construct as many as 40 homes.
Although McNeil thanked the committee during the March 10 meeting’s public forum, he and other advocates later thanked the Tri-Town News, too. McNeil attributed the newspaper’s coverage of his efforts to provide home ownership and jobs to the community as the reason for the initiative’s initial success.
“We owe a lot to the Tri-Town News, which reported our plans for this project,” he said. “It takes heart and determination to get this project started, but it’s a win-win situation. It’s a wonderful thing to see people move into these units. It’s a good feeling.”
According to McNeil, his initiative gained new life and influential proponents after the publication of a Dec. 15 article in the Tri-Town News. The article described efforts to coordinate construction of an affordable housing project that would provide jobs as well as homes for minorities.
“A lot of people read that story and talked about it,” McNeil said. “John Kaba, a senior mortgage consultant at Wachovia Bank in Toms River, saw the article and called STEPS to ask if he could help. We hadn’t even spoken to Wachovia before, but John said he had read the article and that’s when he called us. People didn’t take us seriously [until we found] a banker who understood the community. He’s been with us ever since.”
Kaba said Wachovia has a communal interest in helping less affluent people obtain a mortgage for the purchase of homes in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.
The bank recently struck an agreement with the state Department of Community Affairs (DCA) that enables it to offer Section 8 housing clients the option of using their rental assistance checks as mortgage payments.
“Our targeted loan offers a below market interest rate — about a half a percent below our fixed rate interest loan,” Kaba said. “We also have two loans called the affordable and partnership loan. They provide mortgages with up to 100 percent financing and no private mortgage insurance, which a lender charges a borrower if less than 20 percent is provided as a down payment.”
Kaba said changes to the federally funded and locally administered Section 8 housing grants allowed Wachovia to accept them as either Principal Interest Taxes and Insurance (PITI), which reduce monthly mortgage payments, or to just include the funds as regular income.
The dual option provides affordable housing applicants receiving Section 8 funding with a critical means of financing the purchase of a home, said McNeil. Without that component to his program, no amount of land would have ensured that most applicants seeking a home of their own could have afforded one.
“We could have asked for this [land] two years ago, but we weren’t ready,” McNeil told committee members after he publicly thanked them.
Kaba said the agreement with the DCA, which distributes the funds to local housing authorities, permits the bank to work directly with Lakewood Housing Authority clients.
“We’re trying to let people know it is possible to achieve the American dream of home ownership with our help and that of STEPS,” said Kaba. “Some people may not have documentable income or may have credit issues. While we cannot promise they will qualify for the homes in this project, there may be other ways to help them obtain a home of their own.”
McNeil said he has enlisted the help of Ben Amato of the Brick office of Primerica; Jim DeLancey, senior loan officer of Eastern Mortgage of Freehold; and Wallace Dolan, a real estate agent with Century 21 in Toms River to prequalify applicants for the affordable housing through credit analysis, education and counseling. McNeil stressed that his program will not be limited to residents of Lakewood; it is open to anyone seeking to live in the community. McNeil said he would look elsewhere in New Jersey to find a home for those applicants who did not qualify for the Lakewood program.
Jim Valle, president of Homes for All, said his organization will do all it can to see that the project is built as the detached single-family homes that STEPS wants. However, the final design of the housing would be dependent on a variety of engineering and cost factors that could influence the end product.
Valle said he would consider the credentials of any qualified contractor who met the organization’s financial bottom line.
“We’ll open things up for bid to anyone who’s qualified, but we look for value,” he said. “Everybody’s got to get a start someplace, but they need to be qualified for the work. Ultimately, we have to produce affordable housing first. That’s the goal, that’s our mission.”
It is a mission that has generated the support of other communities throughout Lakewood, said McNeil. He credits Rabbi Moshe Zev Weisberg and the Orthodox Jewish community with assisting him in realizing a project he has wanted to see built for years. McNeil hopes his Lakewood project becomes a model for other municipalities.
“This is a community project that brings people together,” he said. “We want to get away from the issues that divide people and work on the ones that bring us together. Once you bring people together, you find that you can sit down and talk about problems and find a common solution.”