 Greetings! My name is Gloria Said and I am the director for the City of Columbia's Community Development Department. We welcome you here this morning to our press conference where we will tell you about an exciting new program geared toward increasing home ownership, opportunities for individuals and families who are interested in purchasing homes inside the city limits of Columbia. We want to continue offering ways to address the challenges of how much money is needed to purchase homes and how to keep the payments affordable. Before moving forward I would like to recognize our council people who are here or any other elected officials in the audience. We appreciate you, Councilman DeVall, for being here with us this morning. We have this morning our mayor but before we turn it over to our mayor I would like to also recognize any other department heads who are here in support of community development today. We do appreciate you. We also have our loan committee members Miss Missy Kaufman who's here with us. I'm not sure if Mr. Chambers has been able to make it over but I do want to say thank you to our loan committee members. It's only with them that we're able to get our loans approved by the way so we do appreciate them making themselves available as often as necessary to look at the loans that we're presenting for underwriting and approval. So we do appreciate your help. On the agenda this morning we were here remarks from our city of Columbia mayor the Honorable Stephen K. Benjamin and following Mayor Benjamin we will hear from Felicia Kilgore she's a senior loan officer for community development. Felicia will tell us about the City Lender one uplift program and she will also describe the features that make it one of the best mortgage lending products on the street today one of the best. So without further ado I'd like to present our mayor Benjamin. Thank you Gloria and thank you to the men and women of our community development department who partnered up with our CDCs and other team players here at the city have really led the charge here in the Midlands and I think also established a wonderful reputation nationally for helping leverage good strong public private partnerships. This department with the support of city leadership when thank Mr. Duvall and all the members of city council for their aggressive support of helping develop innovative project products that go a long way to making sure that we are a city for all people. The importance of focusing on affordable housing and workforce housing and making sure we support the redevelopment of more public housing is because you want to be a city that reflects a great strength of diversity that people who live in the city or work in the city ought to be able to live in the city. We ought to be using the levers that we have under our control using community of block grant dollars from the federal government but also general fund dollars to continue to be creative and innovative and trying to find more and more solutions to creating good housing here in the city quality housing in the city that attracts millennials and young families and make sure that retirees are able to stay in their homes and obviously making sure that again we're focused on on on a city for all people. This department has for years developed innovative affordable housing programs of a wonderful city lender one and city lender two programs programs focused on weatherization and rehabbing of the owner occupied homes but also those that are that are owned by landlords making sure that that we focus on weatherization so people able to not only live in a much more attractive home but also be able to keep their power bills down constant innovation and today is another example of that over 18 million dollars and outstanding loans leveraged up with some of our friends from some of our banking partners here here leveraging up a total loan portfolio well over a hundred million dollars focused again on making sure that Colombia is a city for all people this wonderful city lender one uplift program that Ms Kilgore is going to cover in a moment helps address some additional challenges that that again the process of iteration and constant innovation helps you identify how you make a program better and she's going to touch on on the specifics of that challenge. We've got to make sure that in this incredibly challenging environment we're watching the economy continue to soar but watching every day Americans still struggle in many respects the challenge of income volatility is real. The average American family on over half of the average American families can't afford an unexpected four hundred dollar bill. How do you handle that. So we've got to make sure that we use all the levers at our disposal all the tools that we may have and continue to again be creative and iterate and innovate to make sure that that every citizen has a chance to live up to the guy giving potential right here in Columbia South Carolina. I know that I am. I know that Councilman Duvall and all the members of city council are very proud of the constant innovation here. We're going to continue to support it. We continue to to devote not only general fund dollars but directing community development block grant dollars to some of our more challenging areas across the city and we're going to continue doing that. Thank you Gloria. Thank you. Thank you and your team. We're going to continue pushing in this direction. Happy to take some questions later on. God bless you. Good morning. Good morning. It's a great day to be in the city of Columbia. We are truly excited about this new program that we're about to launch. It's called the ceiling one uplift. We've heard from the residents. We've heard from our bankers. We've heard just from general conversations that we need to come out with a better program to assist individuals. Julia falls within the working class. Load of moderate incomes to help them purchase homes. We know that homeownership stabilized families. It makes life easier. It's better for the children. So what I want to reiterate is that this program allows individuals to purchase homes up to $150,000 only requires $500 down and we offer this program in partnership with eight different local banks. We have some partners here with us today and thank you. Thank you for coming to support us. So what we do is we get them qualified. You know, we ask that client to come see us. We are a fierce team of three. So we work with them. We work with them to get them qualified and get them in the right direction to move forward. So it is a 80 20 loan structure whereas our partner lenders will provide 80% of the financing and the city will provide 20% of the financing. So we get some creative for us interest rates concern. But what we're most proud of that there's no PMI no private mortgage concerns involved. So that's a very nice way of being able to keep their payments down low as low as we can keep it and put the cream on the top of this all of this we do provide $3500 towards closing costs, which is huge. We have never offered that in the past, at least for the past eight years that I've been here aboard with the city. And that is granted. So we would not ask them to pay that back. We just ask them to stay in the home, occupy the home for five years. And so which another great way of being able to assist with home ownership. So the client do have to qualify. They do have to meet the income guidelines. single person is looking at buying a home. The maximum income is 39,500. If it's a family of four, maximum incomes 55,000. So there's still some some flexibility of getting folks into homes. And what what we have noticed that if you once we've gotten you qualified, you've gotten pre approved, we've noticed that you can buy a home up to $500,000 with mortgage payments, it's not exceed $500. That's huge. If you look at rent today, you can hardly find a decent apartment for no less than $800. So this is a very great way of getting into home ownership and save them on the housing expense. Thank you, Felicia. I hope you all can see based on what I said earlier why this is one of the best long products on the street. So we're hoping that based on this information, our real estate community and there are many of you here today, I do want to say thank you all for being here. We appreciate partnering with you. Because without you, we can't get these people in the door. And of course, you're the ones that will help them find houses. And we do appreciate you. We also appreciate all of our bankers. And I would like to take a moment just to talk to mention to you who those lenders are that have partnered with us. Some have been with us for many, many years and some are relatively new. But is through their partnership as well, that we're able to to help individuals. We know that we have with us for Citizens Bank. I've known Tommy for a very, very long time since we were like a long time. And then we also have individuals here from Sonoma's I see Ms Tracy Brown who used to be a part of the city of Columbia's team and community development. But we won't hold that against you. She's still working with us on the banking side. But we do have other lenders. I'm trying to get to my list here. We have South State Bank, Mr Nate Barber. And in addition to that, we work with Pal, Middle Citizens, Federal Credit Union, Security Federal Bank, and we have Charmaine up here with us today. We have Wells Fargo mortgage, BB and team mortgage, Sinovus, First Community Bank and also assurance lending. So we do say thank you all so much for your participation with the program. So having said that, I would also like to say thank you to the community development staff who's also up here with us. Thank you to city council for your forward thinking, knowing that there's a lot of different things that we have to constantly be mindful of and making those changes to meet the needs of the community as it relates to affordable housing. So having said that, I would now open it up for any questions that you might have for anyone. It seriously underscores the challenge we face here. I mean, all across all across America. This is a challenge that we're facing. How do we make sure that we have more housing options for our citizens? This is a significant challenge that we face. If you look back at the last survey, and it's always important to look at the fact that now that people can apply for different types of public assistance online. If you look at the last survey that Columbia Housing 30 did, I think they had over 20,000 folks who asked for either help with conventional housing, section eight housing, or asked of being public housing. Now some of those folks came, those requests came from the West Coast and the Northeast as well. But it still underscores the fact that there's a significant need in this metropolitan area, as there is if you just Google search, you'll see the same discussions in Greenville and Charleston and Charlotte and Raleigh and Richmond and DC everywhere across its country. So having more tools, having more tools at your disposal and being very creative about ways in which you leverage up a finite amount of public resources to pull in a significant amount of private sector resources is the key. What this team has done over the last several years, using a not a large part of money, but using it again to leverage it. So as Gloria and Felicia mentioned earlier, some of you that not everyone here has a mortgage, not everyone here spent a whole lot of time in basic finance or high finance. And I know that when I was very young, I had not yet. But using these public funds as leverage to create to take down barriers to opportunity for folks is a very creative and thoughtful way to doing this. So we're talking about leveraging I guess we have about 18 million dollars in these various programs now, leveraging up a loan portfolio that probably exceeds $125, $130 million. This is private sector money because because the public sector is wanting to step up and take a second position to I think we have a default rate of less than 1% or less than 2%. So you're finding that if you give people an opportunity right now and to specifically answer your question, your question specifically about public housing, which is something separate apart from what our community development partners here do. But what is fuel the angst in this country, both on the far left and the far right, is that people don't feel like they're getting a fair shot. Now, give me an opportunity. If you give me an opportunity, you remove some of these false barriers to entry just to have safe, affordable housing where I can work hard, take care of my family, provide shelter and be able to keep some of my income to put food on the table and educate my family, then people will be successful. These types of tools remove so many of those barriers to give folks a chance to live up to the guy given potential. The challenge regarding public housing is still very real. It's still very real all across this country. The amount of resources devoted there, the thing we're talking about deferred maintenance across the country and the tens of billions of dollars, that's going to require a much more focused macro approach from the Department of Housing and Urban Development on the local level. There's some things that we can do to facilitate that development and we're going to do that. I have several more meetings of the course of this week and affordable housing task force that we're going to be assembling, looking at how do we attack this in a very comprehensive way. Public housing, section eight housing, affordable housing and obviously going all the way up to 120% of the air meaning income, making sure that just hard working men and women who again work in the city can also afford to live in the city. And just on that note, we talk about the office and just one more quick thing if you want to add in. Will this program kind of apply to the folks who already have those vouchers that they're looking for a place to live? Well, yes, I've met with the Housing Authority. We'll continue to meet with the Housing Authority. We'll appoint some new Housing Authority commissioners today at our at our council meeting. On the second issue, you're talking apples and oranges. So we're talking about people who are looking to become home owners for the first time. And they are and they are across this city. Hundreds, if not thousands of folks who have who emerge from public housing and our homeowners in the city, some using some of these tools that are affordable that our Community Development Department has put forward. We get folks last last of opportunity. And I guarantee you so many of them will take advantage of it. It's it's good math. It works every day. I mean, it works every day. And it's important to note again, it's the innovation of our of our staff partnered with the private sector. All the things that that that we're seeking to do and that we're going to have to do moving forward is we're talking about a finite amount of resources, whether it's coming from the federal government or coming here in the city. The city of Columbia has not raised your taxes in a decade in a decade. We've been good stewards of taxpayer resources, just recognizing the overall tax climate and the challenges that you have with being having so much of our land mass, not on the on the on the tax rolls. So as creative as you can be in leveraging good, solid, public private partnerships that then manifest themselves into putting a family into a home in great neighborhoods. And we have great neighborhoods going to great schools, a wonderful educational innovation happening across Richmond one, Richmond two, and Lexington, Richmond five. If we continue to do that, then then you're going to continue to build a strong, healthy city, a strong city, a healthy city, a prosperous city is nothing but a collection of great individuals and families that make up great neighborhoods that then make a great city. So it's it is incredibly rewarding to try and help someone getting into into a home where they don't have to worry about some of the very basic things that they are not have to worry about. It's not easy. And a whole lot of folks are still still struggling. It's out. It's our challenge to try and help address those needs. I can't see I see light, but I say ahead. Okay. So my wife and I are fixing to be put in a house later this month. And so I guess our roles are in our when they're about federal first time buyer programs and whatnot. And I was kind of informed that partly because the government shut down that some of that money has dried up, the federal side of things. Is there a finite amount of money going to this program? I'll let Gloria and Felicia speak to the source of funds. But as it relates to the federal shutdowns and should cross river, you need to call Congressman Joe Wilson and make make sure he knows we don't need to shut down the government anymore. And also just so you guys know, the Boston Street Bridge and Javay Street Bridge will soon become toll roads. So if you come across the bridge, that's a joke. That is a joke. Please do not. If you if you if you tweet, if you tweet that, if you tweet that, if you tweet that, put the smiley face on there. Source of source of funds. I could not have done that. I will say that there isn't an endless, endless pot of money. But we do have money that we've programmed for this particular year in CDBG funds that we will use for for our housing program. So yes, we do have a certain amount of money available. We're hoping that we'll use it all so that as we program funds in the future, we'll we'll know that we you should continue to fund that since it's a very popular program. It does. We're hoping that we can help at least 15 to 20 families with the funds that we have set aside. Of course, what we've been doing housing programs for over 30 years, we plan to continue. They're very popular. They actually help provide us with a revolving loan fund. So as we loan the funds, the money comes back and then we can continue to make affordable housing loans to the public. And for some of you, it's always instructed to me if you go to the city website, look at the community development page. It lays out the details about really in a very easy way to digest how these programs work. But as as Gora mentioned, this is a new product. If you look at the various programs we have, affordable housing, see the one to help. You'll see that we have 56 outstanding loans in the affordable housing program, city lender one 41 loans, city lender two 109 loans. So they're they're currently well over 500 loans currently being serviced again in partnership with the private sector and a 1% delinquency rate. So this also tells you hardworking folks that go through the programs, the counseling to take advantage of these wonderful programs, recognize how great of a blessing this is and have been great stewards of the of the public trust and moving forward with this.