Door to Homeownership Remains Open in Mississippi

A HOPE partnership opened the door to homeownership for Camesha, a single mother who was not only a first-time homebuyer, but the first person in her family to own a home. The school teacher qualified for down-payment assistance through the NeighborhoodLIFT program, a collaboration of Wells Fargo, NeighborWorks America and HOPE. Without the grant, she says, the three-bedroom home in Indianola, Miss., would have been out of reach. Other institutions had declined her previous mortgage applications because of student loan debt so she worked to improve her credit score. Camesha moved in her home in 2019. Less than a year later, she feared she would lose it in the wake of the economic crisis brought by COVID-19. With her monthly mortgage looming and her bank account shrinking, Camesha contacted her financial navigator at HOPE to seek a payment deferral and was approved. “Thankfully, I managed to make my mortgage payment on time. But, it was good to know that HOPE was there for me, if I needed them,” she said. Though Camesha did not need a deferral, 274 other HOPE mortgage borrowers did through the second quarter of 2020. Many of these forbearances were to low wealth individuals underserved by other financial institutions. Low wealth people and communities of color have been hardest hit by job losses and other economic effects of the pandemic.