There’s more than one way to help middle-class Granite Staters become homeowners, and Steve Saltzman of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund says his organization’s been doing it for more than 40 years.
How?
The New Hampshire Community Loan Fund provides people and communities with loans, coaching, and guidance that enables them to become economically secure. The result is thousands of would-be renters turned into home owners and property managers here in the Granite State.
Saltzman explains how the Community Loan Fund works, its mission to expand homeownership, and how New Hampshire state government can help in this episode of “Up To Speed.”
Sponsored by Legislative Solutions.
A few highlights:
What is the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund’s origin story?
Forty-one years ago, there was a manufactured housing park with 13 homes in Meredith, N.H. The owner was elderly and was going to sell to a hotel developer. And so those 13 people who owned their homes, they didn’t own the land underneath. They were going to have nowhere to go because that hotel was going to be built there.
So, we organized the cooperative, and the homeowners bought the park. And for 41 years, they’ve been running it themselves.
Since then, we’ve organized a 151 cooperatives in the state of New Hampshire, and it’s become a model that’s being copied across the country because it’s considered the best affordable homeownership program.
You’ve described your mission as taking people who aren’t “bankable” and getting them bankable. What does that mean?
There are a lot of people likely to fall into that category. They could be young, they could be someone who’s had a medical (debt) collection. There are any number of reasons why people don’t, but the whole idea is there’s lots of private capital out there. How do you leverage it, and how do you take advantage of it?
Philosophically, our organization believes New Hampshire is better when we’re a state of homeowners and a state of business owners, not a state of renters and a state of employees working for a corporation in some other state. Philosophically, that’s how we’re oriented.
You use the phrase “manufactured home” many times. For many New Englanders, when they hear “manufactured home,” they think “trailer park.” What’s the real story of manufactured housing in New Hampshire, and how significant is it for this state?
Have you ever heard that expression ‘No one washes a rental car?’ Well, if you think about housing, trailer parks — when they’re owned by absentee owners, rents go up, and there’s a lot of deferred maintenance.
But when you go around the state and realize a third of the manufactured housing parks in New Hampshire are now owned by the residents — it’s night and day. The landscaping, the care, the people — they invest in their communities.
If you talk to part of the mayor of Portsmouth about how we did a lot of work with the city to help put six new homes two miles from downtown. The most expensive was $160,000. I really do think it’s the starter home of today.
