By Janet Murguía
A home with a white picket fence has always been a manifestation of the American Dream. But for many families, today’s economy has kept this dream from coming true.
While the recession has left many without the option to buy a home, predatory lending and risky mortgages are the culprits separating millions of hard-working families from the picture-perfect house with the white picket fence — the biggest investment most of us make.
This is not the story, however, for Adelaida and Wilfredo González. In the midst of a foreclosure crisis that is predicted to claim nearly two million homes this year, the Philadelphia couple defied the odds with the help of Nancy Rodríguez, a housing counselor at Asociación de Puertorriqueños en Marcha (APM), a Latino nonprofit organization that provides health, educational, and homeownership services to Philadelphia’s Latino community.
The González family was repeatedly told they did not qualify for a standard mortgage and homeownership was not for them, but when the couple turned to APM, they were carefully matched to an affordable home loan under Nancy’s guidance.
In this age of cruel predatory lending that sets up so many families to fail, especially Hispanic families, who suffer nearly twice as many foreclosures as whites, housing counseling provides the critical guidance that brings hopeful families within a fair shot at obtaining homeownership.
Having the keys to a home opens the door to the financial mainstream, affording many families with the opportunity to send their children to college or the ability to sustain a financial emergency. For most families, homeownership goes beyond the white picket fence.
The National Council of La Raza), the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States, is helping 2launch the Fair Mortgage Collaborative.
The FMC is a nonprofit organization whose members include certified lending organizations, brokers, and housing counselors who provide families with honest and fair mortgages and guidance. FMC certification guarantees that families will not be subject to the unscrupulous practices that have victimized too many people.
NCLR believes that promoting homeownership through housing counseling is the perfect antidote to the housing crisis and this nation’s worst recession since the Great Depression. In an effort to ensure that our families get a chance to achieve the dream of homeownership, NCLR, as a member of the Alliance for Stabilizing our Communities, closed out National Homeownership Month with a Home Rescue Fair in Los Angeles. Housing counselors, attorneys, and mortgage servicers were on hand to provide free on-site counseling services to families struggling to pay their mortgages.
The Los Angeles fair was part of 34 Home Rescue Fairs being presented in collaboration with the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development and the National Urban League with the support of Bank of America. Taking place in communities facing high foreclosure rates, they served more than 11,000 households.
One-on-one counselingis one of the most effective tools for building financial knowledge and sustainable wealth in our communities. In conjunction with reforms in the mortgage market, distributing vital information and making financial and housing counseling available to communities of color are important steps in addressing wealth disparities, finally making the dream of homeownership a true possibility for all families.
(Janet Murguía, president & CEO of the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy and civil rights organization, writes a monthly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. Reach her at opi@nclr.org ) © 2009
