Katrina's Angels

Coordinating resources for the survivors of major natural disasters.

News and Announcements

AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE

Date: 1/9/2006


AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE • January 2006

OAKLAND • A nonprofit developer is using manufactured housing to create new homeownership opportunities in the high-cost San Francisco Bay Area housing market.

Oakland Community Housing, Inc. (OCHI), is purchasing small vacant lots around the city and then placing manufactured homes on the properties that are then sold to low- and moderate-income families.

ACORN takes on Katrina-related issues
NEW ORLEANS Hurricane Katrina won the first round, battering the headquarters of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), but the group is fighting back.

The organization, which represents low- and moderate-income families across the nation, has formed the ACORN Katrina Survivors Association to give residents a voice in the rebuilding efforts. ACORN is one of the parties to file suit against the Federal Emergency Management Agency and others to fight evictions that were taking place in the wake of the hurricane.

The survivors association will be involved in helping displaced residents return to New Orleans and rebuild their community, said Maude Hurd, ACORN president.

ACORN, which is known for its grassroots activism, wants to make sure that low- and moderate-income residents are well represented in the planning efforts, Hurd said, noting that the organization has approximately 9,000 member families in the New Orleans area.

In October, members staged a caravan into the city’s Ninth Ward to claim their right to return, placing signs that said “Do Not Bulldoze” on homes. ACORN also convened a two-day community forum on rebuilding New Orleans.

In another move, the group reported that displaced hurricane victims were not receiving the mortgage relief that was being publicized. Most of the relief measures offered by the subprime industry, such as suspended mortgage payments and late-fee waivers, were being granted only for September and were less extensive than those offered by most prime mortgage servicers, according to ACORN. This was going to have the greatest impact on African-Americans. In the New Orleans area, subprime loans accounted for almost half, 46.2%, of all conventional mortgages made to African-Americans in the area. In contrast, subprime loans made up just 15.8% of the conventional loans made to whites.

The disaster hit home for the group. ACORN’s New Orleans headquarters was badly damaged in the hurricane. The building’s roof was ripped apart, and the office contents ruined, according to Hurd, who works out of Massachusetts.

ACORN temporarily relocated its main offices to Baton Rouge, but officials hoped to be back in the renovated New Orleans headquarters by the beginning of 2006.

Hurd, who has been president since 1990, said she doesn’t expect the recent hurricanes to change the group’s priorities. “We’ll still be working hard on housing and banking issues,” she said.

Active in about 80 cities, ACORN has several key campaigns, including increasing the production of affordable housing, fighting predatory lending and supporting living-wage laws. ACORN has roughly 175,000 member families.

The group’s affiliate, ACORN Housing, has assisted more than 45,000 families to become first-time homeowners and has rehabilitated more than 850 vacant and abandoned housing units.

For more information, visit www.acorn.org.

– Donna Kimura

“The East Bay has a serious housing shortage,” said Dwight Dickerson, OCHI’s executive director. “We are constantly looking at innovative ways to allow more people to remain here in their own community, near family and friends, and to actually buy a home if at all possible. We think that we have come up with a combination of ideas that will have a very successful outcome.”

A grand opening was recently held for four homes that were built under the group’s Infill Homeowner-ship Initiative. These houses are known as the E Street Project, a reference to the development’s location. OCHI completed another home in 2004, which was sold to a single mother with two school-age daughters.

In addition, the nonprofit is working on 16 more homes on two sites in another area of Oakland. These homes are known as the Linden A and B projects. The first group of homes will be done by early 2006, and the second set is scheduled to be completed in mid-2006. They are significant because they will be the first three-story manufactured homes built under the group’s initiative.

The roughly $1.5 million E Street Project features
single-story homes that are built on a lot that had been owned by the city of Oakland. The 22,000-square-foot lot had become a dumping ground.

Other developers looked at the property and passed on it.

OCHI saw the lot and decided it could put four homes on the site, which is in a residential neighborhood. The organization also built a one-block section of street as part of the construction process.

The Infill Homeownership Initiative has helped the organization think about developing on smaller scattered sites in a way that was not financially feasible before, according to Amanda Kobler, OCHI’s project manager.

OCHI cites several benefits of working with manufactured housing, which, in general, means that sections of the home are constructed in a factory environment rather than built on site. Because these houses are built in a factory, there’s more quality control, and materials stay out of the rain, reducing mold and other problems.

The pre-built sections are transported to a building site and then assembled. The manufactured housing industry estimates that its homes can run as much as 35% below traditional construction costs.

Officials stress that manufactured homes are not trailers, and they are not mobile homes. Built to Department of Housing and Urban Development standards, they are installed on permanent foundations. In many cases, the latest models are difficult to distinguish from site-built homes.

In 2004, one out of 10 new single-family housing starts in the nation was a manufactured home, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute.

The E Street homes are three-bedroom, two-bathroom houses with approximately 1,440 square feet. They were manufactured by Marlette Homes.

The houses sold for about $390,000, which is the market value in the neighborhood. Two of the buyers, however, are Sec. 8 housing voucher holders who will use their vouchers toward their mortgages. These families earn between 30% and 50% of the area median income (AMI), according to OCHI.

Another home went to a family earning about 70% of AMI, and the fourth house was sold to a family that earned about 90% of AMI.

To make these homes affordable, the families may have also received downpayment assistance from the California Housing Finance Agency and/or used the city of Oakland’s Mortgage Assistance Program.

The challenges
Because OCHI is using a hybrid type of construction that calls for attached garages to be built on site, one of the big challenges was to find contractors and subcontractors who were interested and able to do the job.

The group eventually found a local team of contractors to work on the project.

There were also some financing issues. In some cases, lenders aren’t used to handling loans involving manufactured housing. The construction period on a manufactured house is often shorter than a conventional home, so standard loan draw-down schedules may not work and may need to be modified.

For the E Street deal, OCHI received a $270,000 acquisition and predevelopment loan from the Nehemiah Community Reinvestment Fund.

“I think manufactured housing is an important tool in meeting people’s need for affordable housing,” said Peggy Jones, director of the fund. OCHI, she said, is being creative by looking at using these homes for small infill projects.

Wells Fargo provided an $864,000 construction loan. The 12-month loan had a variable rate, pegged at 0.85% above prime, and had a 75% loan-to-value ratio.

Wells Fargo also worked with the families in purchasing their homes.

On the eight-home Linden A project, OCHI received a $1.9 million construction loan from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). On this project, the manufactured-home factory required 50% of the construction costs upfront, according to OCHI officials. SVB agreed to extend the funds without a guarantee from the factory. The bank, however, mitigated its risk by requiring phased delivery and construction of the homes, according to OCHI.

Few affordable housing developers have done deals like these, so OCHI’s initiative serves as a demonstration program.

The nonprofit has received a grant of Ford Foundation funds by CFED, a nonprofit economic development organized based in Washington, D.C., to document the program’s “best practices” so that the strategy may be used elsewhere.

Since it was founded in 1973, OCHI has developed approximately 1,200 units of affordable rental and for-sale housing.


Affordable Housing Finance magazine home page | HousingFinance.com home page

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Unauthorized duplication of articles in Affordable Housing Finance, Apartment Finance Today, or HousingFinance.com is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved and all copyrights held by Alexander & Edwards Publishing, Inc. Reproduction of this publication in whole or in part in any form, on paper or electronically, without written permission from the publisher is prohibited by law.