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March 5, 2024March 7, 2024 HomeSight

Women’s History Month – Uche Okezie

Women’s History Month

This year’s Women’s History Month celebrates women who advocate for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. HomeSight has five women on its leadership team, all working toward this goal.

Uche Okezie

A first-generation Nigerian immigrant, leads HomeSight’s Real Estate Development team. With a background in urban planning and real estate development and over twenty years of experience with non-profit real estate development, Uche is not just instrumental to the success of our development work, she is – as a woman of color in a field that is almost entirely comprised of white men – giving marginalized communities a ‘seat at the table’ in our region.

Q: How does your department advocate for DEI?

A: With programs that are focused on BIPOC populations, we are using an equity lens in the work that we do especially with community members, groups and organizations.

Q: What challenges lie ahead and how do you plan to tackle them?

A: The work continues in ensuring equitable access to opportunities to build wealth, health, and positive community connections. We tackle them eyes open and head on.

Q: What is the most inspiring part of your work?

A: Helping folks get the outcome they were working so hard to achieve.

Q: Do you have a favorite quote?

A: The quote that springs to mind is: “Stay ready, so you don’t have to get ready.” I’m not sure who said it first but it’s in a song by Suga Free.

News

March 5, 2024March 7, 2024 HomeSight

Women’s History Month – Sarah Valenta

Women’s History Month

This year’s Women’s History Month celebrates women who advocate for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. HomeSight has five women on its leadership team, all working toward this goal.

Sarah Valenta

Today, we’re featuring Sarah Valenta, HomeSight’s Director of Community Development.

Q: How does your department advocate for DEI?

A: Our department’s services are delivered by and developed for – and with – people of color. We work directly in neighborhoods whose members have a high risk of displacement. Predominantly these are communities with low income, and low access to services. Before we start a new project or program, we run it through our REDI decision matrix to determine if it fits with our mission and values.

Q: What challenges lie ahead and how do you plan to tackle them?

A: Building generational wealth through business ownership and growth is a traditional way for people of color, immigrants, and refugees to improve their economic situation. We produce projects and programs to support entrepreneurship and business growth in Rainier Valley. The challenge lies in resources: having enough time, money, and support services – like translation services – to identify and support the specific and varied needs of each business.

Q: What is the most inspiring part of your work?

A: The most inspiring part of the work is building relationships with community and business owners, and providing direct support that improves their situation.

Q: Do you have a favorite quote?

A: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” –Barack Obama

News

February 8, 2024February 8, 2024 HomeSight

What do you know about Special Field Order 15?

What do you know about Special Field Order 15? And how has it informed HomeSight’s new project, the Field Order 15 Fund?

A ‘Q&A’ with HomeSight’s Darryl Smith and Uche Okezie

In 1865, as the smoke from the Civil War cannons cleared, the leaders of the battered nation faced their next critical challenge: how would millions of newly freed Black Americans transition from a brutal and barbaric system of enslavement to participating in American life as free citizens?

General Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 addressed this challenge, offering a way forward that offered Black people a stake in the nation’s future. The order redistributed 400,000 acres of captured confederate land to the people who had been enslaved by Southern landowners. Each Black family would receive, in Sherman’s words, “40 acres and a mule.”

President Lincoln approved the orders, but after his assassination, Special Field Order 15, and its promise for equity and opportunity, would be reversed and buried beneath decades of explicitly racist laws that effectively and efficiently marginalized Black Americans. The country’s new leaders chose instead to carry forward the legacy of slavery, forcing generations of Black Americans to fight for every human right, and for every small piece of the American dream, in a system rigged against them.

This year, HomeSight and Black Home Initiative (BHI) revived the memory and intention of Special Field Order 15 by launching the Field Order 15 Fund. For Black History Month, Executive Director Darryl Smith and Real Estate Director Uche Okezie answered questions about the fund, its historical roots, and its anticipated impact for the future.

Why does the Field Order 15 Fund reference this moment in American history?

Darryl: We chose to reference Special Field Order 15 because we wanted this reparative lending program to fulfill this abandoned equity promise. The program provides upfront grant money, low-interest lending, and technical support for Black developers who are building affordable homes in the communities that need these resources most. We want to give Black developers a role and a voice in creating the much-needed housing for the community. We wanted the Field Order 15 Fund to ‘pick up the reins’ that had been dropped for so long, to start to fulfill Sherman’s order.

Uche: We’re taking a community-centric approach to increasing Black homeownership, giving Black builders a seat at the table and an opportunity to grow their businesses while breaking the barriers to Black homeownership, caused by this long history of unmet promises and racist barriers to affordable housing. That history started with the reversal of Special Field Order 15. There are so few BIPOC developers in our community who need and deserve an opportunity to create wealth. It helps them build their businesses, while helping to create wealth in their communities.

How does it work?

Uche: Field Order 15 provides low-interest lending and funding for Black developers, but it’s more than that. We looked at the pain points for developers: how they raised initial capital for feasibility; how they accessed low-interest, non-recourse lending. Then we used our own knowledge and experience to line up help with planning and resources. At HomeSight, we have decades of organizational experience building affordable homes, and we realized we could leverage this experience, as well as resources. We’ve seen how plans can change or city regulations can be challenging. All kinds of things can happen during a construction project. We want to set Black developers up for success to get them from ‘point A’ to construction financing. We developed the Field Order 15 Fund checklist system to help developers go step by step. It builds success into the process.

What are your goals for this project?
What issues are you hoping to address?

Darryl: We’re addressing a deeply rooted problem here, racial inequity, on several fronts. First, western Washington is experiencing a severe housing shortage, particularly affordable housing. Second, Black homeownership in Washington is staggeringly low. It’s worse today than it was in the days before the Fair Housing Act. We’ve not been doing a good enough job in the housing sector, or as a community, and we need to correct that. We hope the fund will help developers not just grow their businesses but produce up to 500 units of housing that will be available for community members to purchase, to begin their journey to generational wealth that can be passed down, and really help the community grow and prosper.

That’s really what this is all about because now, the disparity in homeownership for Black Washingtonians is about half of their White counterparts. That didn’t happen by accident. That happened on purpose because of redlining, because of racist covenants, and because opportunities for purchasing homes around the state have not been equally shared.

So we’re addressing both sides of the coin: working with Black developers to grow their businesses to produce the units that are needed, while at the same time getting folks on the path to homeownership with homebuyer education, down payment assistance, and closing cost help. If we can bring all that together, we will start to – start to – address the racial wealth divide here in Washington state. The idea of ’40 acres and a mule,’ is really about equal opportunity. It’s about creating equity.

Media

January 22, 2024January 22, 2024 HomeSight

thefactsnewspaper.com | January 16, 2024 | HomeSight, as Part of Black Home Initiative, Launches Field Order 15 Fund to Help Black Home Developers Build Affordable Homes

HomeSight, as Part of Black Home Initiative, Launches Field Order 15 Fund to Help Black Home Developers Build Affordable Homes

Exactly 159 years after Civil War General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, the fund will facilitate the building of more homes for sale – and help close the racial wealth divide.

HomeSight, a nonprofit catalyst for equitable homeownership and economic opportunity, announced today that, under the auspices of Black Home Initiative (BHI), it will launch the Field Order 15 Fund, a reparative lending program for Black home developers.

The program will provide upfront grant money, eligibility for low-interest lending and technical support for Black developers who are building affordable homes in the communities that need these resources most. By strategically empowering Black developers, the Field Order 15 Fund offers a creative approach to addressing the affordable housing shortage by giving agency to stakeholders that traditionally have not had a seat at the table.

“The Field Order 15 Fund is systems change work at the granular level,” said HomeSight Executive Director Darryl Smith. “BHI was assembled to create 1,500 new Black homeowners in the next five years. We can’t do that with the inventory that’s out there. We need to get more affordable homes built, and to do that, we need to lower the barriers for the builders who are invested in this goal.”

Capital for project planning is often the first and most difficult barrier to new home construction, and the program’s upfront grant money removes this barrier. But the Field Order 15 Fund is more than a grant program. The underwriting team — which includes experts in construction lending, fund management, banking, accounting and real estate development — provides technical support using a proprietary checklist system. This checklist was developed in collaboration with the underwriting team and HomeSight’s experienced Real Estate Development team, who will guide and support builders throughout the process.

After completing the rigorous planning process, developers in the program become eligible for a low-interest pre-development loan commensurate with their project’s size. This section of the program essentially stands in for the loan application for construction financing. Because the underwriting committee will have deep knowledge about the projects in the program, they will be the first point of contact when issues arise. The goal will be facilitating wins rather than negative recourse should development challenges arise.

“HomeSight is the perfect home for this project,” said HomeSight’s Real Estate Development Director, Uche Okezie, who will manage the project for HomeSight. “As a Community Development Financial Institution, we have homeownership counseling, we do mortgage lending, we offer down payment assistance to income-qualified households, and we also build quality, affordable houses. But we are also a CDC – a Community Development Corporation – and our job there is to promote economic growth in the communities we serve. As a CDFI, a CDC, and a member of the BHI, this project pulls all our expertise, goals and imperatives together in a really unique way.”

The Washington State Housing Finance Commission, Amazon, and JP Morgan Chase are funding the project. Business Impact Northwest will provide surround-support services if a developer needs additional support or finds they are not ready for the program.

“The goal is to say yes to developers even when the answer might be ‘Not now, but after making a few adjustments, we’d welcome you to come back to the fund and continue the process,’” said Okezie.

What is “Special Field Order 15?”

General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order 15 on January 16, 1865.

The order confiscated 400,000 acres along his famous march to the sea, which would be re-distributed the newly freed enslaved people, providing each family with “40 acres and a mule.”

President Lincoln approved Special Field Order 15, but after his assassination his successor Andrew Johnson rescinded it, returning the land to former enslavers. Black people never received “40 acres and a mule,” or any restitution for their enslavement. The following ten decades of explicitly racist policies prevented Black people from staking a claim in an economically secure future.

The Field Order 15 Fund aims to fulfill this abandoned equity goal.

About HomeSight

Since 1990, HomeSight, a nonprofit Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) and Community Development Corporation (CDC), has worked to preserve and promote economically and culturally diverse communities through affordable homeownership, business development and community advocacy. HomeSight believes communities can only be strong, vibrant, and equitable if homeownership is attainable, cultural anchors can thrive in place, small businesses have access to the knowledge and tools to excel in changing markets, and prosperity is built and shared among all members of each unique community.

About Black Home Initiative

Black Home Initiative (BHI) is a multi-year, regional effort from Civic Commons that targets the racial inequities at the core of the housing ecosystem to increase homeownership among BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) households. BHI’s initial emphasis is to create opportunity for 1,500 new low- and moderate-income Black households to own a home in South Seattle, South King County, and North Pierce County within the next five years. The initiative convenes cross-sector partners who collaboratively act on local priorities ranging from homebuyer preparation to construction financing to policy reform. By centering those most affected by the work, BHI is creating a foundation for long-term systems change. The ultimate impact we seek is racial equity for everyone and an increase in intergenerational household wealth.

Media

January 22, 2024January 22, 2024 HomeSight

Seattle Times | January 16, 2024 | Seattle-area nonprofit launches fund to help home developers of color

Seattle-area nonprofit launches fund to help home developers of color

By Heidi Groover

Seattle Times business reporter

In the predominantly white real estate development industry, a Seattle-based nonprofit hopes to help developers of color get much-needed affordable housing projects off the ground.

HomeSight, a nonprofit developer and lender, launched a new fund Tuesday to help small-scale developers in the early stages of building affordable for-sale homes.

Funded by Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and the Washington State Housing Finance Commission, the fund will offer $550,000 in grants for developers of color in the earliest stages of building, such as surveying possible job sites, getting legal help or putting money down to secure a property.

Another $1.5 million will fund low-interest loans for the next steps, such as hiring consultants, architects and engineers to put together plans and applying for building permits. Those initial development costs can vary based on the project. Uche Okezie, director of real estate development at HomeSight, estimates that predevelopment work on a town home development, for example, could average about $75,000 per home.

The fund is open to all developers of color with a focus on supporting Black developers. Given wealth disparities and discrimination, Black developers are more likely to start with smaller portfolios and face more challenges getting loans for construction projects, Okezie said in an interview.

“They don’t have the same financial backing as their white counterparts do and so it makes it a little bit harder to get started,” she said.

Builders of color all over the country face similar challenges. Nationwide, fewer than half a percent of developers are Black, by one estimate. A 2020 report found that just 5% of members of the Urban Land Institute, a real estate and land-use group, were Black. Organizations in Washington, D.C., and California have started similar efforts to support developers of color.

HomeSight has labeled its effort the Field Order 15 Fund, named for the 1865 order that designated land in the South for newly freed enslaved people, often referred to as the promise of “40 acres and a mule.” President Andrew Johnson later repealed the order. The organization calls the new program an attempt to “fulfill this abandoned equity goal.”

The new fund is part of a larger effort to help 1,500 low- and moderate-income Black households buy homes in South Seattle, South King County and North Pierce County. To reach that goal, HomeSight Executive Director Darryl Smith said the region needs to support more developers interested in building housing affordable to first-time homebuyers.

The Field Order 15 Fund will support developments of homes for sale that are affordable to those making 120% of area median income or less. That amounts to roughly $131,000 for a couple living in King County or $103,000 in Pierce County.

HomeSight hopes to begin distributing funds to developers in the next three to four months.

Diversifying the people building housing across the region can offer role models in the industry and diversify the types of developments being built, Okezie said.

“I would like to be able to say I bought my home from somebody who looks like me who built it,” she said. “They understand the things that I want, and also to keep the money in our community.”

Heidi Groover: 206-464-8273 or hgroover@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @heidigroover.

Media, News

January 5, 2024January 22, 2024 HomeSight

HomeSight’s Uche Okezie Wants to Put Co-Ops on the Map in Seattle

Okezie joined the Remarkable Credit Union podcast to share how HomeSight’s housing co-op project, ʔúləx̌(U-lex) @ Othello Square, can keep community members from being displaced – and create a stronger community.

People may not be familiar with the word ‘ʔúləx̌’ – it’s the Lushootseed word for ‘gather’ – but the word ‘co-op’ should be in every Seattle homebuyer’s vocabulary, HomeSight’s Real Estate Development Director Uche Okezie told the hosts of the Remarkable Credit Union podcast last week.

Okezie joined the podcast to talk about HomeSight’s partnership with Verity Credit Union and how it helped bring the U-lex @ Othello Square project to fruition. Tina Narron, the Chief Lending Officer at Verity Credit Union, joined the discussion as well.

Hosted by Pixelspoke CEO Cameron Madill and Pixelspoke Senior Marketing Manager Kerala Taylor, the podcast is geared to “help credit union leaders think outside of the box about marketing, technology, and community impact.”

The hosts asked Okezie and Narron: “Why a co-op?”

Okezie, who has worked at HomeSight for over 20 years, said the changing homeownership climate played a major role in HomeSight’s decision to bring the limited equity cooperative (or LEC) model to Seattle.

Since HomeSight began working to help people purchase homes 30 years ago, “things have been changing in Seattle,” Okezie explained. “Land is more expensive. [HomeSight] typically relied on down-payment assistance to help income-qualified folks purchase homes, but there’s just not enough to cover the gap in affordability between what they can afford and what the market says they have to pay in order to purchase it.”

Okezie said an LEC provided “another pathway to provide that level of affordability.”

Sometimes described as the ‘first rung’ of the ladder to homeownership, co-ops, said Okezie, “everyone who is a resident in the building is a part owner of the building. They have bought shares and that gives them the right to live in their unit for however long they own their shares. It gives each household, or member, a vote in all the building operations. Whether it’s the budget, or the board members — who are elected community members – their share gives them a vote on what happens with their building and in their community, and that community is the building.”

Okezie said community is a significant difference between condo ownership and co-op ownership. “Because everybody owns the building cooperatively, they all have a vested interest in its destiny, its future, and they have the right to communicate that to their fellow members, the people that they all share this asset with,” said Okezie. “You aren’t going to have your own mortgage, you’re helping to collectively build wealth, the asset of the building that you all live in and share.”

Narron said Verity Credit Union jumped in at the beginning of the project, when HomeSight invited all members of the Othello community to sit down and discuss their needs. “HomeSight did a really good job of hearing all of that, gathering all of that data, [and] coming up with plans,” Narron said.

Podcast host Madill commented that while Othello Square is a “truly innovative initiative,” it “alone won’t solve the affordable housing crisis in Seattle.” She asked Okezie and Narron: “How do you hope the project might help change the narrative when it comes to affordable housing solutions?”

“I think our biggest stumbling block here has been that it’s just not a common model,” said Okezie. “It’s rare in Seattle. I would love for this to be something that was completely normalized and another option for people.”

Narron agreed and said the LEC model presented an opportunity for credit unions to normalize the unique elements of this mortgage product. “We’re looking at this as a pilot for the West Coast because this might be another viable option to help, not necessarily solve, but help with solving that affordable ownership problem that we’re running into. Cost is out of control, inventory is so small, financing is so difficult. We push the American dream, but how do we help people actually achieve it?”

Okezie said that dream can be realized for more people with “more co-ops, more limited equity co-ops, and more demand for these units” in the new year. She wants co-op ownership to be “just as commonplace as saying: ‘I’m going to go buy a condo.’”

Listen to the Verity Credit Union Podcast here.

U-lex @ Othello Square has opened applications to income-qualified buyers. Situated at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and South Holly Park Drive, U-lex will offer 68 units affordable to families earning 80 percent or less of the area median income at the time of purchase. To be eligible, purchasers must have a household income 80 percent or less than the area’s median income by household size, and be first-time homebuyers or have not owned a home in the past three years. Learn more about U-lex here.

Media, News

December 20, 2023January 22, 2024 HomeSight

Is the American Dream of Homeownership Out of Reach?

NPR’s SoundSide posed this question to a panel joined by HomeSight’s Executive Director Darryl Smith and all agreed change is long overdue. (… and HomeSight has innovative solutions to unveil in the coming year.)

Last week, HomeSight Executive Director Darryl Smith joined a panel with NPR’s SoundSide to discuss homeownership in Washington. Host Libby Denkman said the unfavorable climate for first-time homebuyers – created in part by 7.5% interest rates and housing home prices jumping 40 percent since the pandemic – left many feeling “shut out” of this traditional path to generational wealth stability.

A $750,000 median price for a starter home in King County puts homeownership out of reach for a lot of people, Smith said, adding that he bought his first Seattle home with his wife over 20 years ago for just $99,000.

Times are tough now for millennials who want to become homeowners, Denkman said, and Smith pointed out that for people of color, this situation is far from new: homeownership was deliberately placed out of reach through legal channels for hundreds of years.

“It’s easy to think this is a new problem and it used to be easier across the board for people to buy homes, but frankly, that isn’t true for everyone,” Smith said. “Redlining and other laws shut out people of color from the advantages of homeownership, explicitly excluding them from ways families build wealth, pay for college, start businesses or deal with a health catastrophe. In many areas, the government played a direct role in creating this ecosystem of housing disparity, and it’s led to a wealth gap that’s only getting wider.”

Because it is a nonprofit Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) with a mission to help low- and moderate-income families secure mortgages, HomeSight can offer programs such as down payment assistance or reduced down payment requirements. “Unlike commercial lenders, we’re governed by the Department of Financial Institution, but we have that mission, that drive, to navigate the challenges our clients face,” said Smith. “That’s what we do. It’s incredibly important work.”

But out-of-reach housing costs represent only part of the problem, and the panel also discussed the housing shortage.

“First-time homebuyers are seeing fewer and fewer choices in their price range,” Smith said. “There’s this critical gap between what someone can afford and what’s actually out there.”

Smith said that as a developer of affordable housing, HomeSight is bringing an innovative solution to this challenge. Next year, HomeSight hopes to break ground on a co-operative housing development, U-lex @ Othello Square for low- and middle-income families in south Seattle. Situated next to the light rail station at Martin Luther King Jr. Way and South Holly Park Drive, U-lex will offer 68 units affordable to families earning 80 percent or less of the area median income at the time of purchase.

“If you look at housing as rungs on a ladder, and you see people that cannot reach that lowest rung, we’ve got to put rungs within reach,” said Smith. “For many low- and middle-income people in Washington, even a so-called ‘starter house’ is too big a leap to get into the real estate market. With a co-op like U-lex, people can start building equity at a much lower price point than you’d find in this housing market. U-lex is creating the first few rungs on the ladder, so people can start the climb to the true financial stability homeowning allows.”

Smith said HomeSight has also joined more than 80 partners in the regional housing community to form the Black Home Initiative, which has a goal of creating 1,500 new black homeowners in the next five years. “This is a big problem, and we need everyone at the table to find solutions and create strategies to solve this. Housing isn’t just one issue, it’s several. We need to make changes in the way we do appraisals, zoning, land use, construction financing and lending.”

BHI’s goal is to “make sure we can offer opportunity to as many families as possible, particularly to those who have been denied in the past,” said Smith. “This approach lifts everybody up, not just the people we help directly, but whole neighborhoods. Looking at this holistically is the key to creating a healthy ecosystem. We all do better when we all do better.”

News

December 11, 2023December 11, 2023 HomeSight

HomeSight Leader Darryl Smith Appointed to Covenant Homeownership Program Oversight Committee

HomeSight’s Executive Director Darryl Smith was selected this month by Governor Inslee to serve on the Covenant Homeownership Program (CHP) Oversight Committee.

HomeSight, a nonprofit catalyst for equitable homeownership and economic opportunity, worked to pass the legislation that created the CHP, a first-in-the-nation program that aims to repair the economic damage caused by generations of racially discriminatory housing policies.

Smith, working in partnership with the Black Home Initiative Network and the Housing Development Consortium, testified before the Senate Ways and Means Committee in favor of the legislation that created the program.

“So many people and organizations, including HomeSight, worked so hard to bring the Covenant Homeownership Act to fruition,” said Smith. “I’m honored by this opportunity to help ensure the CHP makes a profound impact on black homeownership in Washington state.”

The CHP, administered through the Washington State Housing Finance Commission, creates a special purpose credit program for down payment and closing cost assistance for demographic groups shown to have experienced economic damage from discriminatory housing practices.

In his appointed role, Smith will ensure the program works efficiently and effectively to create new black homeowners in Washington.

“The foundation for generational wealth building is rooted in home ownership,” said Smith. “In being denied that opportunity, generations of people of color have been largely shut out from the benefits afforded by owning a home such as starting a business, sending a kid to college, and even surviving a financial emergency due to a health challenge. The CHP is a critical first step toward acknowledging the harm caused by racist covenant laws and practices and working to reverse the impact of this history.”

News

November 20, 2023November 20, 2023 HomeSight