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seattle
Housing Project, Seattle, WA

SEATTLE

First-time Homeowners Learn the Ropes at HomeSight

A decade ago, if anyone had told Martin Lawson and his wife that they’d be spending this Christmas in a home of their own, the couple would have told them they were dreaming.

At one point they were homeless. And then she became pregnant. They plunged ahead, both landing $5.25-an-hour jobs. Since they had no car they bused between work and their sparse 425-square-foot apartment in a public-housing project. “We had a mattress, two plates, two forks, a frying pan and a radio,” he recalls.

Working through HomeSight, a nonprofit home building and counseling agency that runs a home-ownership program, the couple was able to access two down-payment assistance programs for a total of $35,000. They also got a below-market interest-rate mortgage. As a result, monthly payments on their $157,000 house are just $900.

HomeSight is an example of what can be accomplished by government and private sector funders working together. During the early 1990s, much of the Living Cities investment in Seattle—funds from HUD, foundations, and financial institutions—went to creating HomeSight, now one of the country’s most successful community development corporations (CDCs).

Living Cities helped HomeSight staff up and also helped guarantee a bank line of credit with which the first homes were built. Living Cities funds are administered by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), which participated in creating HomeSight in response to residents’ demands that homes be built on “surplus” land from the construction of I-90 through parts of southeast and central Seattle.

Since 1991 Homesight has built 334 homes affordable to first-time buyers; fulfilled more than 25,000 information requests; assisted more than 1,124 moderate- and low-income households in buying their first homes; and administered more than $13 million in homebuyer assistance. In all, HomeSight has helped first-time homebuyers accumulate over $40 million in new financial assets. Its work has now spread to suburban areas from its modest neighborhood beginnings.