Housing advocate says with the right help, homeownership is attainable for all Minnesotans

The third barrier is affordability assistance. Banks will look at your income and look at your credit score and qualify you for a loan of a certain amount. Depending on the market that you’re trying to purchase a home in, there may or may not be homes that are priced for your first mortgage. Say you qualify for $200,000 as your first mortgage. In some communities, you can purchase a home for $200,000, but in other neighborhoods and communities, the median home value is $350,000 or more.

There’s an affordability gap between what you can afford to pay for your monthly mortgage payment and what homes cost in your community.

There are several different initiatives that we have that are really focused at trying to impact the racial disparity gap. One is a program that we do in partnership with Minnesota Housing, the home ownership opportunity alliance, that’s really about trying to align mortgage lenders and realtors and home-area counselors to centralize eliminating racial disparities as to have a more equitable approach to how they do business.

We know the importance of representation and cultural responsiveness in order to serve different communities. Our network of homebuyer counselors offer services in multiple different languages, including English, Spanish, Somali and others.

Another thing that we’re doing is trying to advocate in partnership with all of our partners to create some targeted down payment-assistance resources. The first generation down payment assistance is very specifically focused on people who haven’t owned a home and whose parents haven’t owned a home or lost it through foreclosure.

The advancing Black homeownership special purpose credit program is really something that’s intended to be in partnership with the first generation down payment assistance. It’s something that allows us to go even deeper in order to recognize some of the past harms that have happened that are very specifically focused on foundational Black households.