September 13, 2002

Housing advocate tests program in S.C.

By Jim Parker

Bruce Marks admits to pulling no punches when it comes to his 14-year drive to force banks to provide affordable mortgages to "hard working" low-to-moderate income individuals and families. To him, it's personal. Even the back of his business card has a pair of glaring eyes above the admonition, "Financial Predators Beware!"

Lenders chafe at the aggressive confrontational style -- he once dubbed himself "a bank terrorist" and used to march outside corporate headquarters. But he gets their attention, and results.

Take his first meeting with Bank of America chairman Hugh McColl, which came days after wrangling a $150 million loan deal with First Union. Marks said that McColl charged that nonprofits are just looking for grant money. "Yeah, and all bankers are evil," Marks shot back.

Yet from that starting point, McColl and Marks carved out an agreement in 1999 for theCharlotte banking giant to commit $3 billion to low-interest, no-down-payment loans to lower- and middle-income home buyers.

Marks, who visited Charleston this week on a tour through the Carolinas and Georgia, gives credit to the bank as the only one of a half dozen or so major institutions he's banged heads with to voluntarily pony up funds.

Now primarily on the East Coast, Texas and California, the corporation plans to be in all 50 states by the end of 2003, Marks said. The group has focused on urban areas.

Using South Carolina as a test state this year, it intends to branch into rural towns through meetings at churches and other gathering places, he said.

Jacqueline Goss, director of the corporation's Charleston office on Wallenberg Boulevard, said she is trying to get the word out about the program, which has been available locally for three years.

Marks' activist roots go back to 1988, when he formed the forerunner to the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America to set up a housing trust fund for a hotel workers union in Boston. The group got a big boost six years later when New England-based Fleet agreed to put up $140 million for mortgages that NACA would manage.

Fleet had been accused of abuses -- customers paying excessive fees on second mortgages arranged by the bank in Georgia and elsewhere in the Southeast.

Since then, NACA has gone on to accumulate $4.3 billion in loan commitments from banks and finance companies nationwide.

The corporation focuses on people who may lack perfect credit, don't have sufficient savings or face discriminatory practices that keep them from acquiring a home at market rates, Marks said. Blacks account for 83 percent of NACA's homebuyers.

Hispanics make up 5 percent, although the percentage of referrals in the that community is growing.

The group holds periodic meetings for first-time homebuyers. From there, counselors meet face-to-face with prospects to assess their finances and remedy any credit blemishes. They team with real estate agents to locate suitable homes and stand behind buyers at closings. And they follow through to make sure homeowners keep up on payments, which include a $50 a month "neighborhood stabilization fee" to guard against foreclosure. Not that missed payments are a problem -- 99.75 percent of homebuyers are current, Marks said.

Banks benefit because NACA takes care of any credit or related troubles ahead of time, Marks said.

"From the banks' point of view, everybody who goes to the bank is approved," he said.

The 11,000 homebuyer "members" nationwide informally agree to be activists themselves, whether lobbying for anti-predatory lending laws, wearing yellow No Loan Shark T-shirts or posting a NACA sign in their yards pledging their commitment to community advocacy.

NACA assisted first-time homebuyers in the Lowcountry such as Lyndon "Lenny" Gallant and Derrick Green.

Gallant, a respiratory therapist at Trident Regional Medical Center, had looked for a year without much luck. Then a real estate agent referred him to the neighborhood corporation.

"A couple of months later, I bought my home," he said.

The newly built home in the Forest Hills neighborhood off Dorchester Road is great, said Gallant, who is married with two children, ages 7 and 4. The house payments are an affordable $712 a month on a 30-year note at 5.8 percent interest.

Gallant said he meets regularly with the NACA staff in Charleston.

"I was guided in the right direction," he said.

Similarly, Derrick Green closed Aug. 30 on a three-bedroom home built in an older section of Forest Hills. The seller absorbed his $2,200 in closing costs on the $70,000 home. Mortgage payments are $500 a month, and he "bought down" the interest rate to a microscopic 4.8 percent. Green, 22, is a salesman for Frito Lay and is engaged to be married in December.

"My barber told me about it (the program)," he said. "They really worked with me and took the time that was needed."

This article is reprinted here for non-commercial, educational, fair use purposes only.