| Centers rehabilitate homes, lives
By Michael Wacht
TAMPA — When Vickie Hollie got the phone call
that she had been approved for financing on her first house, she was
speechless. Janet Richards, a loan credit counselor with Tampa United
Methodist Centers (TUMC) here, called her at work to share the good
news.
“When she told us, when she called, I was just…,”
Hollie said. “It was something a person likes to hear.”
Hollie and her mom, Cindy, moved into their new
townhouse last December. It is the first home either of them has ever
owned and the home where Hollie’s two children will grow up.
“They love it,” she said. “They have a
backyard. When we first moved in it was great, but it was a lot of
work. It felt very wonderful to move into a new place.”
The quality of a person’s home, especially for
a child, is an important part of that child’s development, according
to the Rev. Louis Jones, executive director of TUMC.
“With kids being bussed to other neighborhoods
of great housing stock and that being their environment for part of
the day, then returning to the squalor of their own neighborhood for
the rest of the day and night, it really creates some anxiety around
their development, both socially and academically,” he said.
The Centers’ Housing Management Services
ministry is a 14-year-old program designed to help people in Tampa’s
inner city purchase their first home. Its goal is to help low- and
moderate-income families become first-time homeowners, according to
Angie Dyson, assistant director of Housing Management Services. The
ministry’s clients are people who are “under-served by traditional
lending institutions” and never dreamed of owning their own homes.
TUMC’s help takes several different forms. It
has purchased dilapidated homes, then rehabilitated and resold them.
It has helped administer federal and local funds grant and loan
programs to help people purchase homes that ordinarily would have been
out of their financial reach. It has helped people solve financial and
credit problems that prevented them from qualifying for loans.
“We’ve also been able to partner with local
lenders and have gotten them to offer loans to our clients at
below-market interest rates so they can afford more house for the
dollar,” Dyson said. “They also waive or reduce the closing costs
if a client has received the First-Time Homeowners class through us. A
more educated buyer is less likely to go into foreclosure…and the
banks have more flexible underwriting guidelines.”
Dyson says the ministry has helped an average of
about 500 people per year since its inception. There are 500 or more
people the Centers can’t help. “Their issues are just too big or
too complex for us to help them with the staff we have,” she said.
Once a person becomes a homeowner, TUMC tries to
connect them with the church nearest their home, Jones said. “It’s
not necessarily a United Methodist Church, but a church in the area
where they’re living. We firmly believe that in order to bring about
systemic changes, one’s environment needs to change physically, then
you can develop on the spirituality of the community.”
The connection with a church is not only to help
them spiritually, but also physically through day care or food
assistance ministries.
Jones also hopes the Centers’ ministry
connects people with Jesus. “I hope they see Jesus through us, our
caring, our compassion and our enthusiasm to help others,” he said.
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